I remember as a child, I had to attend Sunday masses. I didn’t like them; it was for me a kind of torment, literally and metaphorically.  Probably I was very afraid to be confronted again and again, by the fearful personifications of God presented by the clerics. I was terrified to be punished for all the sins that I hadn’t committed yet, but would in the future. There was no escape from that. Even the angels had a kind of apocalyptic dimension. When lying in bed, I often thought about my “personal” Angel. I had no doubt about the fact that somewhere an Angel was watching me. I had one big problem. I wasn’t sure if it was a good Angel or a bad one. Maybe it was a hellish one and not a holy one.  I had a picture of an angel hanging above my bed. He was beautiful, with blue eyes and white hair and a very, very distressing smile. And so it was that my Angel was gazing at me, as if he knew that one day I would betray him and leave him. When at the age of 12 I had rebelled and had declared  that “I don’t want to believe and I categorically deny any belief in such a cruel, evil, bad god  and I do not want to be frightened any more of hell, devils and original sin” I had terrible dreams for the first months afterwards. In my dreams I was somewhere close to the church. It was a big Gothic church, and it was always night. I was attacked by devils, they tore me, hurt me; wild winds had jerked me into the square in front of the church, darkness and a terrible fear occupied my dreams.  That was a horrible experience,  a nightmare, but even more it cemented my decision that God, who is haunting me,  punishing me, and scaring me, will not be my god.
And so it happened, that I became somehow atheist, somewhat Buddhist, a follower of my personal faith; all together my religion is a kind of eclecticism.

Since that time I have been trying to avoid that hell on earth, in my daily life, in my relationships with others, but also in my thoughts and feelings. Hell and Heaven, we create them for ourselves, here on this planet, in our lives, our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, hatreds, and in relationships.
Hell and Heaven are also created for us by nature, life, and the condition of being homo sapiens, something that is unavoidable; we can only accept it.

After this very long introduction it is time for introducing my new painting.

This is an installation composed of four panels, titled “Heaven Is In My Mind”. It belongs to the “My Brain” series.
There is a lot of blue, gold, purple, dark plum, grains of all sorts, and recycled stuff.
It is large: 80 cm x 80 cm.

The painting “when the demons are awakened” from the series My Brain tortured me so intensively that I had to change it. For comparison purposes I am publishing both the old and the new versions. In the new version I worked with more tricky colours and I added more crazy materials. It is more frantic and wilder. I think that the words “frantic” and maybe even "furious” could describe this new painting. What else should you expect when the demons are awakened?

My Brain when the demons are awakened - new

My brain when the demons are awakened - old

Some scientists believe paranoia may be a reaction to high levels of life stress. Lending support to this opinion is the evidence that paranoia is more prevalent among immigrants, prisoners of war, and others undergoing severe stress. Sometimes, when thrust into a new and highly stressful situation, people suffer an acute form, known as "acute paranoia", in which delusions develop over a short period of time and last only a few months. Individuals with paranoid schizophrenia commonly have extremely bizarre delusions or hallucinations, almost always on a specific theme. Sometimes they hear voices that others cannot hear or believe that their thoughts are being controlled or broadcast aloud.

After this short description of paranoia I should introduce myself as a potentially excellent representative of the paranoid species: I was a political refugee, and for almost my whole life I have been thrust into highly stressful situations, I am premature child, I always thought and always felt like an alien amongst the mass of homo sapiens, and I have developed a few very strange ideas about this universe. For example: I really believe that the theory of the Boltzmann Brain Paradox is very probably correct. I truly believe in it.  It is my own paranoiac delirium.

This new painting is inspired by the latest ideas about Boltzmann Brains from Don Page, a physicist – “Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Giga years, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers per commoving volume by thermal or vacuum fluctuations (Boltzmann brains). If the number of ordinary observers per commoving volume is finite, this scenario seems to imply zero likelihood for us to be ordinary observers and minuscule likelihoods for our actual observations.”

If that is true, it would mean that you and me, you reading this and I writing this, are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than persons with a real past and possible future (if we are lucky or unlucky enough). My and your memories and the world we think we see around us are illusions.
“Hence, our observations suggest that this scenario is incorrect and that perhaps our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate.” In other words it means our universe will die one day.

This is my paranoia – my hallucination. Millions of Boltzmann Brains are floating in my brain.

As a dried leaf, the Bay Leaf is used as a flavouring to spice up our meals. Polish bigos is impossible to imagine without bay leaves. Can someone imagine garam masala without bay leaves? No, full stop! The Bay leaf is toxic. Especially if someone decides to drink a brew of bay leaves, say more than 10 litre. That could be harmful. As a drink it isn't hideous, I tried it once and it's actually OK, somewhat bitter with a strong taste.

What is the essence of the Bay Leaf? Everyone hears about it, everyone tastes it in one or another dish. But recently the bay leaf has fallen into obscurity and it is no longer as important as it was in the past. A long time ago the laurel tree was a noble tree; it was a sacred tree of the ancient Greek God Apollo. In Chinese folklore there is a great laurel tree on the moon. It used to much more than a mere spice.

My holy Bay Leaf, today I adore you with this new painting. Especially for you, I made this painting, using the best quality acrylic paints and I even fixed your authentic "SELF" inside the painting. The painting is made up of two panels. On the central panel you can see two real bay leaves. The panel is 100 cm x 120 cm. The second panel is a small one with a print of my right hand. It's function is as an homage to the cave painters of the stone age.

"Paranoia III – The wonderful life of a Bay Leaf" – by Kasia B. Turajczyk; 2009

I think that emptiness, when contrasted with its opposite, can be very dramatic and unsettling, especially in an abstract painting. Emptiness should not be confused with the void; they are two different concepts.
(Emptiness is a key concept in Buddhist philosophy, or more precisely, in the ontology of Mahayana Buddhism. The phrase "form is emptiness; emptiness is form" is perhaps the most celebrated paradox associated with Buddhist philosophy.)

"The Freedom of thinking - freedom of choice" by Kasia Turajczyk - 120cmx120cm /2009

The painting “The freedom of Thinking” is a new art work. It is a 6 panelled painting. Three of the panels are fairly expressive; the other three are fairly simple and calm.  Two of the three are extremely simple, almost empty. The white one is just a white space with two lines, one dirty-white whilst the other line is black. The second canvas, the red-orange one, is only disturbed by one black line, like a shadow.  The third panel is coloured black and white. It has more narrative content.

The three remaining panels are very expressive, full of traces of brushes and pallet knifes, the contours between the colours are aggressive and rough. The contrast between the calmness and the not-calmness, expression and the absence of it, is it significant? Maybe the calmness and its opposite complement one another more than contradict each other?
The person who buys the painting (the 6 panels) has the freedom to make a choice by their selection of the panels. He or she can hang the panels in the same way I think they belong together, but this is not inevitible. The person who will own the painting is free to make up her/his own mind; they are absolutely free to create their own composition. He or she can put the 6 panels together or maybe separate them into two groups; the dynamic group and the calm group on different walls, or maybe all of the 6 on the same wall but with a space between or maybe each of the panels will hang in different rooms.

I wonder to what extent that freedom to create ones own composition from the 6 panels will generate a new art work. I made the painting but at the moment that I cease to own it anymore the painting begins to live its own life. I believe that non-figurative art is “dispossessed”; a free interpretation is the essence of such art. Only the title of the art work may determine the thoughts of the person who looks at the painting.
It is my strong belief that freedom of thinking is the only freedom that we possess, and that the freedom of thinking at the same time determines our choices. In the sense that we only have free choice if those choices are conditional on our free thinking.  Whether we like it or not we are slaves of our material existence and our material possessions. Only our dreams and our thoughts are free and in some way independent.

Three of the panels are painted using acrylics and the other three are oil paintings. I used brushes, pallet knives, rice seeds and dried grasses.

I think that the giant cities, like NYC, LA or Mexico City are an unhealthy phenomenon. They are more likely ill and degenerate bodies than healthy ones; but at the same time they are absolutely fascinating organisms. They are fascinating in the same way as a patient with an unknown but terminal disease. Everything is possible. Millions of potential viruses, germs, cancers, infections…. Is the immunological system strong enough to create antibodies to protect them from attacks by their own body tissues?  Will the treatment be helpful or it will just damage the body more?  Will the patient be saved by a miracle? There are no certain answers, only experimentation is possible.

Hereby I present my ‘City’ – my Metropolis. I love big cities but at the same time I don’t have a good feeling about them. My city is a mystic and mythological Moloch but also a modern one; different when seen from above, different when seen from below, different inside, different outside. There is little connection between the top and the bottom; there is little connection between the dark and the light. There is only one thing that really connects the top and the bottom – the loneliness. The one thing that is common for all species is the loneliness, it doesn’t matter if you are at the top or on the bottom, the loneliness is everywhere, omnipotent, especially in the cities. The big cities are a synonym for loneliness and nothing more.

While at the top of K2, we are also lonely but in a different way; the loneliness in nature is more ‘normal’, eventually we are a part of nature, too. It is more an emptiness in the Buddhist sense. This is something that we can try to understand, it is more cheerful than painful. The loneliness between the 10 million others, locked in a labyrinth of bewitched abnormalities, is cruel, absurd, unbearable, and paradoxical. The sense of our existence is determined by the sense of the senselessness of that existence. Vive la merde!

To make this painting I used the best quality acrylic paint, dried herbs, rice seeds and couscous seeds. Only three colours have been used: black, orange and vermilion.

Metropolis alias Moloch by Kasia B. Turajczyk

Metropolis – acrylic on canvas; 80cmx80cm

P.S. Mythologization and mystification of the big cities are only the illusions and lies of poets, painters, photographers, movie directors, and me too.

]]> http://blog.kasiaturajczyk.com/2009/02/new-painting-moloch-alias-metropolis/feed/ 5 http://blog.kasiaturajczyk.com/2009/02/the-newest-my-past-and-my-future-painting/ http://blog.kasiaturajczyk.com/2009/02/the-newest-my-past-and-my-future-painting/#comments Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:15:12 +0000 Kasia http://blog.kasiaturajczyk.com/?p=72

The title of this work is "My past and my future", the newest one "my past and my future"

This Past represents the small abstract oil painting, the colourful one with the poem. It is a real poem, written by my. Occasionally I am possessed by my muse. In a sudden incandescence I become a poet.

More on The newest "My past and my future" painting

The title of this work is "My past and my future", the newest one "my past and my future"

This Past represents the small abstract oil painting, the colourful one with the poem. It is a real poem, written by my. Occasionally I am possessed by my muse. In a sudden incandescence I become a poet.

Although I know that it's impossible
I want to touch your nakedness,
To get close to you.

So you open me the door to your dreams at least once,
When I dare to knock.

I would like to eat you like a mango,
In the way only I can do,
With sensitive perversion.

Embrace you like a Texan landscape embraced from a plane,
Without peaks, mountains and hills, sunny and boring.

If you couldn't lock yourself on seven locks and you didn't turn seven times seven keys in these locks than maybe something could be possible.

Give me one, this smallest key, please!

The small abstract I made in 2004. At the moment that I placed it on a big, white space of the canvas it became a new painting. The white canvas, the future is connected with the past, the small abstract painting by wires. Depending on the mood it could be connected outside (behind the canvas) or inside around the canvas. Our future is almost certainly determined by the choices that we made in the past and by the time that is left to us.

My past and my future by Kasia B. Turajczyk

I am thinking about framing it in a transparent frame. Maybe Plexiglas. I am curious about this idea. Or maybe I should use a black frame, since our future is limited by death. However why should death be black? Maybe death is colourful and elusive, like a rainbow?

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The painting is made up of two panels. I painted the first panel, the small one, during a winter night a few weeks after his death. His death was so unreal for me. I couldn’t accept it. It was so surrealistic that when thinking about it I felt nothing, nothing at all. This was a fearful-paranoid experience.  For this small panel I used oil paints, seeds and some grains.

The final painting I finished only a week ago, in February, 2009. The second canvas once belonged to Maciek. He didn’t finish it, there were only a few spots. I left them; the blue and the red spots on the background panel are his spots.

* from art catalogeus- Maciej Szewczyk, February 1994

I am horribly lazy. It is a terrifying fact that my laziness is more than normal; it is more like a cosmic laziness.  My lethargy is not only physical but first of all intellectual.

It took me several weeks to write down these few sentences and even than I had to force myself.

Let my new painting testify to my indolence.  A new painitng? Hm….. In some way it is new.

The title of the new work is "The past and the future". This Past represents an old abstract oil painting. But at the moment that I placed it on a big, white space of the canvas it became a new painting. The white is the future. I am thinking about framing it in a transparent frame. Maybe Plexiglas. I am curious about this idea. Or maybe in a black frame, since our future is limited by death. However why should death be black? Maybe death is colourful and elusive, like a rainbow?

My Past and My Future, in a black frame – 2009; oil on canvas + canvas

in a plexiglas frame

in 'a rainbow' frame