WHAT LIES BENEATH

Niall MacMonagle Dreaming in Black and White

Acrylic and mixed media on canvas Courtesy Ranelagh Arts Centre

ANNA Hryniewicz’s paintings imagine ideal exoplanets because “here on earth, people waste their energy on irrelevant things. There is so much to discover if humanity pooled their resources. By now, we should be so much more advanced”.

In January 2007, Hryniewicz came to Ireland from Poland, “for a few months” in search of “change and adventure”. Within a week, she had a job teaching pre-school. Within a month she had a flat. “I called my husband and three-year-old son, and said come over.” And they did. Their second boy, now seven, is “Irish, Irish” and a champion Irish dancer.

She likes the weather here, “it’s always autumn or spring, no extremes” and she likes the beaches “unlike crowded, commercialised Baltic beaches” and likes “the open mentality of the Irish”.

Born in Wroclaw, Hryniewicz was “always drawing as a child, on my walls, the furniture, in my copybooks, drew caricatures of friends and teachers” but having graduated with distinction in piano performance she had “a now or never moment” and did a masters in art.

At Czestochowa University, “I felt I had started flying. I loved everything; sculpture, graphic design, painting”. She then switched to abstract, “so natural to me”. Her optimistic, energising palette includes orange, reds, blues, yellow, green but this work, Dreaming in Black and White, signals a new direction..

Her studio, an extension to her home in Baldoyle, means “studio and home at the same time, children calling, I’m cooking and sneaking into the studio”. Dreaming in Black and White began with a big black brushstroke, a dripping cloud. A many-layered work, Hryniewicz looks “a lot and go back and scrape, reveal, cover”.

The blue, the beige, the greys, and “then a need for something subtle, those faint lines”. The title gives people “freedom to interpret”.

In Ireland “I started from zero. I knew no one, no artists, the art scene was not for mothers and children”. She has just finished a residency in Cill Rialaig, “My first!”. The exoplanet concept still intrigues her and she makes paintings that are out of this world.