Lines drawn in sand

Where the Pisa River meets the Narew, the waters still follow their natural course. Among meadows, peat bogs and quiet oxbows, Anna Tymińska paints. Her work intertwines the landscape of the Kurpie region with the rhythm of daily life – walking, observing, noticing the delicate enchantments hidden in ordinary forms along the way. Attentiveness to what is subtle, mysterious and easily overlooked becomes the pulse of her painting. Tymińska’s canvases capture the moment when vision softens, when the senses are quietly reprogrammed and contours dissolve. Movement and rhythm begin to outweigh form. It is a state of suspension, where thought loses its edge, the gaze drifts, and consciousness drifts through quiet currents. Her paintings reconstruct this altered mode of perception, freed from everyday order. Hence their dreamlike atmosphere: cool silvery greens, moonlit tones, an air of stillness. From this luminous haze emerge female figures with metallic, phosphorescent skin, their gestures and identities resisting clear definition. They are not separate from their surroundings but absorbed within them, blending with the landscape until all boundaries fade. Body and space exist on equal terms. In her vision, corporeality does not stand apart from nature but confirms belonging to it. Her colours reflect the local world of rivers and fields: mussels whose shells shift between warm and cool browns and blacks, revealing pearly interiors. Unio pictorum, the painter’s mussel, once served as a vessel for pigments. Its very name carries a fragment of history – a shell that holds colour becomes part of the act of painting. In the clear rivers of Poland, these shells still exist. Her compositions, like mussels, unite opposites – the rough and earthen with the luminous and secret, shaped by filtration and intimate contact with water. In Kurpie stories, water is both boundary and passage. Rivers, ponds and swamps mark the meeting point of the everyday and the supernatural. In their bends dwell water spirits – in Polish folklore known as rusałki and wodnice – who can seduce wanderers into the current or, when treated with respect, offer their protection. The river’s vortex was seen as a force drawing down not only the body but the soul. Marshes held the uncertainty of another world, where each step could open a different reality. The rituals of local people reveal reverence for this element that could both nourish and destroy. As in Slavic mythology, water carries tales of transition – from life to death, from waking to dream, from the known to the hidden. This movement defines Tymińska’s approach to painting: not as a fixed mark, but as a record of change. Her practice follows the logic of thresholds. The women in her paintings seem caught in suspension, their awareness drifting away from the everyday, as if embodying the legends of water themselves. In their calm faces one senses the echo of a siren’s charm edged with danger, and in the swirling currents around them, an ancient promise of transformation. It is also visible in her technique: the rhythm of the brush shifts – from circular motions to broad, diffused strokes. Here, motion is not an aftereffect but the very spine of composition. The surface thickens, light breaks through successive layers of paint. The shifting patches of colour build the painting’s rhythm – from calm, soft transitions to sudden contrasts. Painting becomes a record of transformation, not an illustration of form. Each layer of paint carries memory of what came before – a memory of body and time. The works are formed through overlaying, erasing and returning, closer to the structure of memory than to traditional composition. The mark of a gesture is not a narrative but evidence of presence.The trace of a gesture becomes a proof of presence rather than a story about it. Her painting exists at the threshold of the visible and the sensed, without seeking to divide them. The gaze is never stable; it drifts, disperses, changes scale. Perception itself becomes part of the work. Tymińska’s method restores the pace of the hand and the eye, honouring a quiet focus on what is here and now. It is a form of resistance to haste and excess, a way of paying attention to simple phenomena. Painting becomes a way of staying within experience – a slow and deliberate process that sustains continuity and concentration, a state that is its own purpose. Through these works echoes of old myths return – an intuitive turn toward primordial relations with the world. The artist draws upon archaic figures of femininity, invoking ancient bonds with natural forces; her protagonists partake in rituals of passage. They are priestesses, witches, guardians of thresholds, tracing protective circles in the sand. The line drawn across the ground, appearing in one of her paintings, may mark what is close or seek to sense the boundary. This ritual repeats itself in her process – the slow, focused movement that gradually builds an inner order. Through it she summons her own world, where painting becomes a way of feeling and cherishing what is near, fragile and easily missed.