This piece began with an image I could not shake: Polish writer Ula Janoszuk, reading one of her early stories, compared seaside buildings to underwater creatures. The sentence lodged itself in my mind and insisted on becoming a painting.
I grew up far from the coast and only visited the Baltic in winter, usually sent there to “breathe iodine” so I would not get sick so often. I remember the roar of the waves, ice knocking against the water, and the ordinary details of life around it: apartment blocks, children with sledges, a woman carrying shopping bags. It always felt as if the sea was some vast creature suspended just above everyday reality.
So I painted the Baltic as a whale floating over a housing estate, the way it survives in my childhood memory.
