I painted my first oil at thirteen. Nearly four decades later, I am still painting.

I come from a family in which painting and sculpture existed long before I did. Among my ancestors was a sculptor who worked for the Sapieha family, while a nineteenth-century painting by another member of my family still hangs in a Polish church. I grew up with the idea that making things by hand was not unusual. It was simply part of life.

My work begins with the figure, but rarely ends there. I am interested in the point where a face, a body, a wing or a fragment of architecture stops being literal and becomes something psychological.

I return constantly to thresholds: between strength and vulnerability, beauty and decay, faith and doubt, presence and disappearance.

I do not look for perfect surfaces. I look for the patina of time — cracked plaster, worn gold, traces of something that has already happened but has not entirely left.

Over the years I have completed close to three hundred paintings, with seven solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. My work is held in private collections in Vatican City, Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, France and the United States. My commissioned work has included portraits, murals and a portrait of Pope John Paul II sent to Rome.

Angels entered my work in 2001.

They never really left.

Today I paint in Texas.

The subjects change. The question remains the same:

what is left when everything unnecessary has been stripped away?