The Alchemy of Emotion
In an artistic landscape often defined by immediacy and spectacle, Joanna Szuba offers something far more elemental: a quiet insistence on depth. Her work does not shout for attention, but rather draws the viewer into an intimate, meditative encounter. Szuba paints at the edge where impulse meets intention, where every layer is both a gesture and a question. Each of her paintings is a suspension point — a state of emotional emergence rather than conclusion. There is no singular narrative to follow, only a feeling to recognize, a transition to witness. Her creative process resists haste, reflecting her belief that true expression must be allowed to unfold, rather than be extracted.
Szuba’s background in pharmacy is not a footnote but a crucial dimension of her artistic method. Years of working with chemical compounds taught her how to measure with patience, observe with precision, and understand that transformation takes time. These principles now manifest in how she blends color, builds surface, and structures her compositions. For Szuba, pigments behave like volatile substances — capable of reacting not only with each other, but also with memory, gesture, and silence. She describes her work as a kind of emotional chemistry: an experiment in creating not a representation of feeling, but its direct sensory equivalent.
Equally foundational is her life in the Bieszczady Mountains, a place that shaped her internal landscape as profoundly as it inspired her external one. The vastness of the terrain, the solitude of its forests, and the myths carried on its wind shaped how she perceives space and mythos. In the mountains, she learned to leave space for what cannot be controlled. This lesson permeates her approach to painting: she invites unpredictability, listens to the pause between gestures, and allows the work to grow organically rather than be forced into resolution. Her art becomes a meditation on what cannot be named but can be deeply sensed — a visual language for the unseen.
Joanna Szuba: Between Shadow and Substance
Szuba’s creative identity did not arrive all at once, but emerged slowly — shaped by years of questioning, sketching, and seeking a visual form for complex emotion. Her earliest attempts at painting were intuitive searches for the right color to express something unspeakable. Over time, and after many years working within the structured routines of a pharmacist’s life, she began to find a rhythm in art that echoed but also liberated her. The moment she stopped painting toward a result and instead began painting as a form of dialogue marked a crucial turning point. Painting ceased to be an act of execution and became a mode of listening.
Today, her work exists in the space between abstraction and symbolism, between the material and the barely visible. Her compositions feature recurring motifs — wings, figures enveloped in space, shifting light, fluid shadow, and the open line of a horizon. These elements do not function as literal symbols but rather as visual echoes, returning in different forms to mark emotional thresholds. The Bieszczady Mountains remain a central force in her visual language: their silence, vast openness, and cultural mythology provide her with an emotional topography from which to build her inner landscapes. Her figures often appear in flux, immersed in a moment of becoming or dissolving, caught in the current of something both intimate and epic.
The central focus of her practice is the state of transition — that fragile, electric moment when emotion begins to take form but has not yet crystallized. Szuba seeks this threshold in every painting. It is not a fixed point but a vibration, an energy that shimmers before definition. To capture this is to stay faithful to the authenticity of inner experience. Her painting is not a search for clarity, but a commitment to the complexity of emergence — of standing at the intersection of feeling and form, and allowing the work to carry the tension of both.
Where Paint Breathes
For Szuba, space is not just a compositional concern; it is the source of everything. Her greatest influence is not a specific teacher or trend, but the experience of moving through physical and psychological landscapes — the tension between silence and thought, between stillness and unseen movement. Her years in the Bieszczady Mountains shaped her ability to observe subtle changes in the environment, to sense the presence of stories in fog, to trace meaning through absence. In these quiet surroundings, she learned to experience color as a sensation rather than a hue, and motion as something that could happen even in stillness.
The painters who inspire her reflect this same respect for gesture, material, and intuition. She connects with artists who place emotional truth above formal clarity: Rothko’s fields of feeling built through color, Twombly’s bravery in mark-making, Kiefer’s textured records of memory and decay, and Tarasewicz’s rhythm of saturated pigment. These figures serve less as references and more as kindred spirits — each of them pursuing intensity not through excess, but through vulnerability. Like them, Szuba approaches painting as a conversation with the unknown, trusting the process more than the plan.
Among the most meaningful components of her work is a specific visual moment: when a saturated layer of color begins to meet transparency. This intersection, for her, is not aesthetic embellishment but the actual breath of the painting. She builds this effect using acrylics layered with glazes and pigments, seeking not brightness but the illusion of depth — as if something is waiting beneath the surface. The act of painting this layer mimics respiration: expansive, then still, then waiting for the work to respond. This fragment determines the energy of the entire piece. It is the point at which the artwork ceases to be hers and begins to speak in its own language.
Joanna Szuba: Into the Circles of Descent
Each day in Szuba’s studio begins with stillness. She does not attack the canvas but approaches it slowly, waiting for the right conditions to appear. Before color touches surface, she observes the air, gestures through space, and listens for the internal shift that signals readiness. Her painting process unfolds in layers, both physically and emotionally. She often returns to a piece the next day, bringing with her a changed perspective, altered by time and silence. This daily practice resists urgency, favoring the wisdom of waiting. For her, painting is not about arriving at an image, but about participating in an unfolding moment.
Her work follows an internal rhythm — sometimes ignited by a bold, impulsive mark, other times by a veil of pigment so delicate it seems like breath suspended in color. Each gesture is informed by sensation, not strategy. The process resembles an improvisation with time itself: fluid, unpredictable, and deeply responsive. Szuba describes her painting not as an act of control, but as a partnership with emotion. The canvas is not a battlefield but a place of listening and exchange. She allows herself to be guided by the painting as much as she guides it — a method that keeps each work alive and evolving.
Her upcoming project marks a significant expansion of both theme and intensity. Szuba is currently working on a series inspired by the nine circles of Hell from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Three paintings are complete, each capturing a stage of descent not as a place of permanence, but as a site of luminous resistance. Her focus is not on darkness for its own sake, but on the subtle emergence of light within it — how illumination can exist even at the bottom of suffering. The remaining works will challenge her formally and emotionally, pushing her deeper into her own unresolved spaces. This series is envisioned as a passage: not a descent to remain in, but a confrontation from which transformation can arise.
