There is a version of me that put the brush down almost twenty years ago. I didn’t decide to stop, not really—life simply filled the space where painting used to live, the way water fills every gap it’s given, until one day I looked up and the space was gone.
I didn’t think of it as a loss. That’s the strange part. You don’t always notice the absence of something while you’re living inside it. It was just… quiet. A door closed so gently I never heard it shut.
Then, years later, I picked up a brush again.
It felt as though the sky had opened.
I don’t have a better way to describe it. It wasn’t a slow remembering or a gradual return. It was immediate—as if every part of me that had been waiting quietly for two decades suddenly turned and said, There you are. We’ve been waiting. In that moment I knew, with a certainty I hadn’t felt in years, that this is what I am meant to do.
What I wasn’t prepared for was everything that followed.
Twenty years is a long time for an artist not to create. All the things I noticed but never painted—the wildflowers along the road, the fox at the edge of the woods, the changing light, the quiet stories hidden in nature—never disappeared. They simply waited.
Now they arrive faster than I can paint them.
I finish one canvas, and another is already asking to be born. Inspiration appears in memories of the hills and mountains of southern Poland where I grew up, in the forests and fields that first taught me to look closely, in the autumn light resting on a duck at the edge of a pond, or in a single flower that pulls me back to a forgotten feeling. Nature never stopped speaking to me. I was simply no longer answering.
Some days it feels less like inspiration and more like a flood, and I’m trying to build boats fast enough to carry it. But I’ve stopped seeing that as something to fix. Maybe it’s simply what happens when twenty years of untold stories finally find their way home.
If you had asked me all those years ago whether I would ever come back to painting, I don’t know what I would have said.
But I’m here now.
My soul was never empty. It was simply waiting for me to open the door.
And now that it’s open, I don’t think it will ever close again.
— Anna