I had not developed as an artist in art school. I had wanted so much to go there, my desire had been so strong,
I had imagined that this really was my destiny and my longing,
but just how lost I was in all of this
can be seen from my desire
to produce the kind of paintings that Andrzej Wróblewski was creating,
like those women in front of the tanks of which only fragments remain
because someone slashed that painting to pieces.
I saw bits of it lying somewhere, barely begun, barely painted. There's nothing to say about this.
At the same time, I tried to paint some pictures for the Church
because we were really very poor, unimaginably so.
When I came to the School of Fine Arts, a friend and I rented a room from a shoemaker.
But it wasn't a room that we rented and lived in,
we simply slept in the same bed as the shoemaker because there was only one bed.
In Kraków, there were several hundred artists who knew how to paint
and knew how to find their way around, too.
But we had no other way of earning money, so we looked around for some kind of work.
When an exhibition of the Reclaimed Lands was organised in Wrocław,
it gave us our first opportunity to earn any money.
Everybody was going there to paint frescos or to do some lettering.
Anything, just to earn a bit of money to live on,
because the only source of maintenance was a tiny grant that barely kept us on the breadline.
It was very hard to earn any money.
So not just I but lots of people had the idea of painting something for the Church, something we could sell or some kind of graphic.
Most of us didn't have parents
or else our parents weren't able to help us.
We were already standing on our own two feet, and our whole group acted in this way.
This, of course, contributed to a kind of disorientation
so when I was leaving art school
I'm sure I had a deep sense of having wasted those three years,
of having picked the wrong career, of not fulfilling my potential
in this matter and of having to search for a different environment for myself.
Perhaps there was also another fairly significant psychological moment.
Namely, the work of a painter, an artist, is solitary.
One of my friends summed it up accurately when he said that the best company for a painter is his own.
But my own company didn't suit me; I needed to be with other people.
Perhaps that's why I was so friendly with Andrzej Wróblewski
and why he played such an important role in my life.
Perhaps I needed that self-development group, I needed other people.
There, in this sort of community I felt better than when I was standing alone in front of a canvass
unable to decide whether I wanted to paint the way my tutors were painting
or whether I wanted to paint like Wróblewski,
or perhaps paint something in the tradition of sacred art
because I knew all of this from the contacts I had during the occupation when I was painting churches.