In the summer of 2010 I had an amazing opportunity to spend a week at a cottage in Prince Edward Island. Having packed the usual necessities I grabbed a large sketch pad and a lot of different crayons. This was going to be my third visit to the East Coast with which I have fallen in love from my very first road trip. I still remember being blown away by the colors in the art I saw in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax back in 2002. Ever since then there was a window into color that I have yet had the opportunity to explore.

Throughout the week I went on long walks seeking out interesting locations to capture through my drawings.  Stepping back from my traditional Dodalism work with ballpoint pens I fully immersed myself in color in order to explore a new dimension in my contemporary drawings. Crayons proved to be an excellent medium for spontaneous and energetic drawings capturing the raw beauty of the landscape which surrounded me. They also proved an ideal link in exploring child like approaches to expression which I have explored both in my Dodalism and Grown up Child bodies of work.

The scale of the landscape and the movement in nature were my guiding elements in composing the drawings. Each stoke mimicked the way the grass was being blown by the wind, the way clouds curled into each other.  The limitations of the colors available to me in my various sets of crayons proved to be an asset allowing me for bolder choices in color and less delay in transcribing the continually changing landscape.

Upon my return to Toronto I decided to further explore the possibilities of color and crayons playing a leading role in newly developing themes in my art.

To this day I am still excited about the endless possibilities a blank sheet of paper offers.  The ability to feel what I am drawing and  my perpetual goal to encapsulate a moment or an idea with in an image continue to make drawing a dominate practice of mine. Whether it is a realistic depiction of a person, an abstract expression or a technical sketch, drawing is one of the most versatile and rewarding mediums in my arsenal.

Artist thoughts

In my early years of drawing I mastered the use of a pencil moving into charcoals, contes and inks while studying at OCAD. Between 2005 and 2009 I predominantly used ballpoint pens to create images perfecting various subtle ways of shading which are unique to this tool. Unlike pencil or charcoal there was no option of erasing. With continual practice my ability and confidence in capturing images on paper increased.

In 2010 I started using charcoals and conte pencils again to do a number of portrait commissions. There is an overlap between the way I draw and the way I paint, most notably visible in my “The Players – Women” body of work which the clients responded too.

I am very excited to see how my drawing and painting is evolving side by side. I can now incorporate highly detailed elements with those of very gestural, fluid and expressionistic nature; color with stark blacks and whites; thick brushstrokes of vivid colors with silver pen highlights which do their reflective nature animate the work, bringing it to life. Examples of this can be seen in my Dodalism paintings section (image update April 26th).

The scale in which I am working is also increasing so that I can draw with the motion of my entire body and not just my wrists and arms. The work will build on what I have done in “The Grown up Child” series incorporating elements from “Dodalism” and “The Players” series such as intricate stream of consciousness line drawing and color brush strokes layered in thin glazes. I am very excited for the future as you will be able to see in the type of work that will be appearing on the website post June of 2010.

I wrote and illustrated my first story in grade eight E.S.L. It was not until I was twenty three that I would begin to incorporate writing and illustration into my art practice. My first project was the editing and assembly of “The Burning Man Diaries”, a zine booklet based on collective experiences of four young men, traveling to the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock desert, Nevada.

The following year I wrote “In the Grange” and “In the Firkin”. Each was just over 1000 words with ten ballpoint and India ink pen illustrations . The stories were self published as zines in 2003 through to 2006, and distributed through The Vendart Project. Over one hundred and fifty copies of each story were distributed in Toronto and New York City.

Writing stories has opened up many other creative projects including mask making as part of my creative development in storytelling.

*Book by Hunter S. Thompson which was made into a movie under the same title.

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

What motivated me to create “The Grown up Child” mixed-media drawing body of work was a recurring event where every so often I would come across a grown up individual who appeared to embody a child like quality which emanated from their being. It was always a positive experience that would make me smile as though I just witnessed something silly. With time I came to relate this experience to witnessing a person in touch with their inner child. In 2004 I set out to create a series of mixed-media contemporary drawings with the goal of portraying adults who embodied such a quality.

In my thesis paper I argued that children possess a certain innocence that has not yet been affected by societal pressures. Their emotions are genuine, not yet influenced by predetermined standards and expectations. In order to depict this innocence I chose the child’s face as a metaphor for the Inner Child, the very core of our being; what Carl Gustav Jung referred to as our “original self”.

My research focused on medical and philosophical literature on the notions of the inner child, child development, and child education. My artistic exploration worked with two key parameters. The first one being the need to create a series of mixed-media contemporary drawings where the work would reflect two qualities of the human condition: fragility and adaptation. The second parameter was to make work that would reflect the personalities of friends I was drawing as well as themes I wanted to explore when working with models who were strangers.

“The Grown up Child” mixed-media body of work is a rich visual landscape which intertwines philosophical and esoteric themes. It captures the quality of beauty which emanates from within the figures, the beauty of innocence, wonder and imagination.

From an early age drawing has been an important creative outlet. I still remember when I was 6 years old and learning different shading techniques from my mom. Drawing manifested itself in various intensities throughout my childhood until in 1992, the world as I knew it changed, as my family and I immigrated to Canada.

Communication presented a whole new set of challenges for me as my understanding of English was limited and nonexistent for approximately 2 years post immigration. I could understand more then I was able to verbally express. Drawing became an outlet.

To this day I am still excited about the endless possibilities a blank sheet of paper offers.  Having solidified my personal style through a year and a half drawing meditation,* there is nothing that I feel I can’t draw. Whether it is a realistic depiction of a person, an abstract expression or a technical sketch, drawing is one of the most versatile and rewarding mediums in my arsenal.

*The Infernal Machine drawing an intense mosaic of non-specific images, spanning nine separate twenty five inch by thirty five inch sheets of paper