Night Painting

It wasn't only horrible, as growing up in a communist regime had its perks. Artists were promoted as social activists and the access to national museums, centuries old treasures, opera houses and theatre was essentially free. One could practically find an art object in everyone's home. Arek Jackowski’s grandparents had one too. It was the most interesting painting that a young artist had been fixating on at every meal he shared with them at their tiny, modernist, Corbusier influenced apartment in Otwock, Poland. As Arek Jackowski entered puberty, the painting had moved and inspired him. He got lost in dark and heavy strokes of a river rushing under a massive bridge. It defined the best years of Arek Jackowski’s young life; pine forests, Jean Michel Jarre's revolutionary music and an unparalleled friendship with Hubert Wojtasik. The golden banks and easy currents of Swider rushed through artist’s entire childhood and youth. Those days, Arek Jackowski’s sketchbooks and pencils were alway present and essential. The copying pencils from Office Materials Factory in Pruszkow were the only media that Arek Jackowski had used back then and which marked every centimetre of his life. In the early nineties, Arek Jackowski’s family had immigrated to Canada. Of what he originally perceived as tragedy, it had begun a new chapter in his artistic evolution. After loosing a world of security, Arek dove right into a bottle of vodka. Everyone was the same. He was broken inside and the only left thing to do in order to remain sane, was to paint. He had moved on from graphite to ink, and lost himself in a newly discovered fascination with Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. His life seamed a satire of its own kind and it wasn’t long before he could not remember the last days of sobriety. The artist recalls one agonizing morning, when a woman, whom he loved like a maniac, had stepped out of his own painting and shook him into a crude awakening. These years were filled with rage and fury and had culminated in Arek Jackowski’s first public exhibit in Kingston, Ontario, after which, misunderstood and crushed, he had set on fire years of artistic achievement. He thought, he was finished and would never touch canvas again. In his late twenties, Arek Jackowski’s focus shifted from painting to psychology and religion. While searching for a healing, he had found lust and passion.