Ewa Stolarz-Staszynska, known by her artistic name Venssa, is a Polish contemporary artist and graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. Drawing and painting have been part of her life since childhood, with art holding a central and defining place in everything she does. Her practice spans an exceptional range of techniques and surfaces — from frescoes painted directly onto walls and stained glass work on windows, to acrylic paintings on glass and canvas. Her stained glass windows can be found in a church and a sanatorium in Swieradów Zdrój, Poland, and her paintings are held in private collections and galleries in London.
After a period away from painting spanning several years, Venssa returned to her practice with doubled energy and an unstoppable creative drive. Having now been painting again for around seven years, she describes the experience as a wonderful journey with no clear destination — only an urgent, joyful need to create as much as possible. For her, painting is not simply a passion but a serious and necessary vocation. The return to art has felt less like a resumption and more like an awakening, one that continues to deepen with every work she completes.
At the heart of Venssa's artistic world is a deep fascination with the human being — though not from a place of certainty or superiority. She believes that while humanity has long considered itself the most important force in existence, we are in truth only one small but necessary part of a vast, interconnected whole, created by a power far greater than we fully understand. For her, the structures of religion, literature, and culture exist to maintain a kind of order within a reality we have barely begun to comprehend. This philosophical perspective quietly shapes the spiritual and philosophical undercurrents running through all of her work.
Perhaps the most distinctive quality of Venssa's creative process is its deeply intuitive and mysterious nature. When she begins a painting, she does not know what she is painting — only when the work is complete does the subject reveal itself, whether it turns out to be a human figure, an animal, an object, a temple, or a house. She describes the experience as being guided by her subconscious, as though something beyond conscious thought is leading the brush. Guided by Pablo Picasso's belief that "Art is a lie that allows us to realize the truth, at least the one we can understand," Venssa continues to create work that emerges from the unseen — paintings that wash the dust of everyday life from the soul and remind us that the work of an artist is never truly finished.
