Rokosz Reflections - On the Process of Understanding

Interpretation belongs to you, the viewer, not me.  If I suggest a meaning about one of my works, then you try to interpret my interpretation.  Meaning belongs to you.

- On Interpretation

Nature is sculpting itself.  I don’t compete with nature.  When I look at a piece [of wood], I only see myself carving a little because the piece is already created.  Nature is the biggest creator.  It’s just a matter of knowing where to find it.

- On Working with Nature

I would see birds fly and wonder, "Where do they go?”  Twice my father’s farm was burned.  Much was destroyed, but the birds flew away.

- On Questioning Nature

It is not my role to politicize in my art.  In creating a work, I choose to play first, to use imagination.  This impacts my purpose.

- On the Creative Impulse

I work to find form.  “You,” I say, “That’s what you are.”

- On Discovery

Poland is very old.  My father was a herdsman, woodworker, and blacksmith.  In the village, we couldn’t buy it; we had to make it.  School vacation meant we were mixing mud (plaster) or working the big ditch horses.  The sun rose at four a.m.  My father would come, wake us up and we would go to the fields.  It was not child labor.  It was called working with family.

- On Early Influences

My teacher from elementary school saw that I could draw.  She talked to my parents and told them I should go to art school.  At 14 she took me to take exams.  My family could only send one of us to school, and so I left the village and was moved to an art high school and dorms for five years.

- On Early Training

Copyright �(c) 2009 by Kirk Hathaway (www.hathawaysites.com).  No words or images on this site may be used or duplicated without the expressed permission of the author or the artist Edward Rokosz.