What Remains – On Memory, Ancestry and Painting

I have been thinking about what remains.
Not in a historical sense.
Not in terms of facts, dates, or records.
But in a quieter way—
what stays after a life has moved through the world.

 

Studio, afternoon light

 

In my family, many traces remain.
A children’s playhouse made by my dad.
A wicker basket made by my grandfather.
A great-grandfather’s carpentry table.
Small things, made carefully, used daily, still present.

 

A Viking head, carved for me by my cousin Wojtek ‘Bobo’ Humeniuk

 

There are also photographs—some with names, some without.
Faces that feel close, but do not speak.

My brother left a notebook with the first sentence of a story he never finished.
He was full of words, stories, imagination—someone who could fill a room with voice.
And then there was only silence.

Others left fragments of their work—music, recordings, objects shaped in wood, tattoos carried on other people’s skin.
Lives that were still unfolding, interrupted too early.

 

A beginning left unfinished

 

I return to these things often.
They hold something I cannot fully explain or reach.
They are present, but incomplete.

For a long time, I searched for answers in my family history.
I wanted to understand where I come from—
not only in terms of place, but in ways of living, making, and seeing.

I was told different things.
That I have talent.
That it comes naturally.
But also that I come from a family without artists—
that this path is uncertain, difficult, not something to rely on.

So I looked for a beginning.
What I found was something else.

My grandmother sewing at home.
My grandfather making shoes.
Hands working with materials, shaping something useful, something lasting.

My mother, who could draw, who had sensitivity and imagination—
but did not have the conditions to follow that path fully.

This did not feel like absence.
It felt like something continuing quietly, without being named.

I began to understand that what I do is not separate from this.
It is a continuation—in a different language.

And yet, something remained unresolved.

When I look at the photographs, I realise how easily a life can become an image without a voice—
a face that looks back, but cannot tell what was lived, what was felt, what was carried within.

 

Family photographs

 

I find myself asking questions that have no answers.
How did they live with uncertainty?
What mattered to them?
What did they believe in, quietly, without leaving a trace?

I will never know.
But the questions do not disappear.

I think this is where my work begins.
Not in the studio or in a clear idea,
but in the tension between what is present and what is missing.

I do not try to reconstruct stories.
What I am drawn to is something more fragile—
a moment that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
A gesture.
A sense of stillness.
Something felt, but not fully spoken.
A trace.

 

Painting, detail

 

I think of painting as a way of holding something of lived experience.
I want to allow it to exist for a moment longer—
to give form to something that would otherwise remain internal or disappear without being seen.

Perhaps this comes from what I have witnessed:
that a life can be full, expressive, unfolding—
and still leave behind only fragments.

Not enough to tell the story,
but enough to feel that something was there.

I do not try to fill that gap. I stay with it, and from there, I paint.