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Artist Statement

Please note that I am currently updating this statement.

“The Infernal Machine” is a year and a half contemporary drawing meditation on love, chaos and nothingness. Its roots date back to grade school doodles scattered amongst hundreds of note papers.

Each of the nine pieces in “The Infernal Machine” drawings are mounted on to Masonite boards. When assembled together the drawings form a large rectangle depicting an intense mosaic of non-specific images.

The drawing process was feverish, all encompassing, with ideas and concepts constantly forming, than disappearing under a tide of new ones. At the height of the drawing meditation the conscious mind would become silent. The process of drawing however continued feverishly with my conscious mind no longer trying to grasp at anything. I was simply creating and allowing creation to happen.

Having started with the red panel I soon realized that I wanted to surround it with an additional eight panels drawn in black ballpoint pen. Undaunted by the task at hand I preceded drawing everywhere I went. I always had a rolled up sheet of the panel I was working on with me as I went about my daily business. Present moments, thoughts and surrounding were reduced to lines which I scribbled in various patters and intensities onto the paper building layer upon layer of ballpoint ink. After a year and a half of drawing it all came together to form a unique organic composition.

Since then I have been developing Dodalism which incorporates the meditational aspect to creating work.

Artist thoughts on The Infernal Machine and formation of Dodalism pt.I

When I was a Kid…

Ever since I can remember, I would scribble any chance I got and could not help it. It occurred naturally, a kind of reflex when I accumulated and processed information. In school, most teachers frowned upon it and panelized me for making my notes look “messy and improper.” It did not stop me; my scribbles kept evolving from hard rock and heavy metal logos, skulls to abstract patterns which were stylized representations of tangible and intangible aspects in my environment.

Growing up in Poland one of the exercises that influenced my dodles was something called szlaczki[1]. They were drawn at the beginning of grammar class in horizontal rows at the top of the page with the use of color pencils. Patterns resembled embroidery, fractals, or to a degree minimalist painting. Looking back at it I see it as exercising abstract thought before learning grammatical rules present in the Polish language. A sort of a stretching exercise for the brain.

Throughout the years my drawing style evolved. I drew a few short graphic stories focusing on a small group of rebels fighting against impossible odds or characters and people from magazines and comic books like Aliens, Spiderman, Vogue, National Geographic, Bravo, etc. In high school, I began using images as metaphorical representations of larger concepts, collaging them together to form narratives.

By the time I was in my second year at O.C.A.D.[2] I was frustrated with my mechanical representation of objects and people. I felt as if I was only copying life, not capturing or expressing it. I was looking for a way to give the image its own personality. I wanted to draw something utterly unique and honest.

The Infernal Machine brought it all together, part 1

It might have been a sunny afternoon or maybe it was raining, I do not remember exactly however I do remember “borrowing” a red pen from the design office at O.C.A.D. and finding a roll of paper lying around somewhere in the Drawing and Painting department in the year of 2002.

At the time, I was reading a lot of Carl Gustav Jung’s writing and other books on the topics of Buddhism, Zen, meditation and infant psychology. It was all tied to my interest of how we develop our personality and identity…style. The readings exposed me to new interpretations of concepts such as no mind, personal / collective (un)consciousness, ego, destroying/understanding the self; universal archetypes; everything is nothing; do / do not there is no try, etc. I was reading and eating it up. It was exciting to me that these ideas were already present in the collective unconscious for thousands of years.

Zap! I sat down at a table on the second level of the awesome atrium that O.C.A.D. once had (and has since obliterated it!) and started scribbling in the centre. The sheet was about 25” x 35” (63.5cm by 88.9cm) and it daunted me. I knew I wanted to take my doodles to a larger format, much larger than anything I previously attempted.

At the very beginning, I stuck to a rough geometrical formula using triangles, rectangles, etc., but soon lost interest in that approach and the drawing free formed. ‘Nothingness’ was the idea which I focused on. I hesitated a number of times unsure how to draw “nothing” deciding to perform the action of drawing with as little or no conscious thought. By doing so I simply created not worrying and hesitating about what it is that I was bringing into existence. I was drawing and loved it.

Intermission, a mention on this and that….

During this phase of my life, I was really into listing to music on my headphones, saturating my brain with sounds and lyrics of bands like Rage Against The Machine, Anti-Flag, Deltron 3030, Tool, The Roots, Apex Twin, etc., etc. My collection at the time included over 300 different cd’s and a couple of tapes. Music played a very important part in the creative process. Its’ rhythmic structures, like a mantra helped me to dive further into the abstract scribble. Through this mantra, I was able to attain no-mind or what felt like a quiet place where one simply exists without defining the reality around them. In such a state I was watching my hand draw as opposed to drawing with my hand.

I wasn’t able to get into the state of no-mind often. If I didn’t fall asleep in the first twenty minutes of the drawing process, waves of thoughts would pound at me as I drew. I started the Infernal Journal in order to record all the interesting thoughts which were taking shape from the scribbles. Writing became a natural product of my visual work; first written on the sheet of paper and later transferred into the scribbled journal. The longer I drew the more I let go of controlling the line work.  A lot of the time the drawing would simply be me interpreting the beats and lyrics into line work. The switch to no-mind happened without me noticing it because as soon as I did I would regress back into the waves of thoughts which flooded my brain with everything but the experience of something akin to being a conduit as my pen rushed across the page as of its own accord.

When my entire focus was on the very tip of my pen, I watched with fascination as it was gliding and digging the page. Years later, I experienced a similar awareness while working with wood medium. There was a peace that came forth from such work where even the sound of a table saw did not interfere or annoy me as I went about creating my new expression. In this sense: woodwork, drawing and sculpting are interrelated for me.

The Infernal Machine brought it all together, part 2

Getting back to the red drawing… About three months into the progress and over a half dozen of ‘borrowed’ pens, the page was filled with red patterns which people compared to satellite views of cites, chaos, textures within stone, and various other micro and macrocosms. I drew everywhere: at home, on the subway, in between doing tricks on a skateboard, in the park, mall, car, class; the drawing went everywhere with me. I worked on it until its installation at the O.C.A.D. Gallery as one of the participants in a show called “Transmogrify”.

Why red and black doodles?

Well, there is one reference I do not mind giving. The red surrounded by black was inspired by my recollection of a time when I was in high school. I drew a composition of a pair of hands emerging from darkness holding up a bleeding heart (freshly removed) titled “My heart is in your hands”. Some other ideas that I often though about when looking or laboring over the drawing were: love amongst chaos, earth/life/thought within a dark universe, the never ending, perpetual and constant change.

The drawing process helped me to work through a lot of new positive and negative stimuli that was present in my life at that time. In this sense, the drawing was also a meditation allowing me a third person perspective on different issues as well as creating a means of perpetuating creativity.

The drawing itself had a presence unlike anything I have created before. Nonspecific in its imagery and only defined by its shape and colour, it nevertheless drew the viewer in with a sense that there is something there. One can spend hours searching for meaning within the ocean of chaos which in some sense I am doing with my art practice still today.

I’m proud of this work of art that took little over eighteen months to complete and I came to call “The Infernal Machine”. This is where Dodalism started to take shape for me.

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[2] Ontario College of Art and Design