Luxembourg is not a popular destination, but if offers inspiration & relaxation, and the Melusina sculpture reminds us of the importance of self-care.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post in which I shared my experiences and observations after one year of living in Portugal. It was very much a “should I stay or should I go” kind of article, as I had very mixed feelings about my life there. As it happened, three months after publishing the post I moved back to Warsaw and felt a great sense of relief. I also felt, having moved countries a good few times by that point, that perhaps I had had my share of packing and sending boxes back and forth, and perhaps the time had come to make Warsaw my permanent home.

Every now and then I come across one of those “Which character from [insert: Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, Star Wars etc.] are you?” quizzes. Buzzfeed seems particularly relentless at producing them, often as many as several per day. As fun as they are, I usually ignore them, however I have taken four or five Myer-Briggs tests, which…

The question I’m most frequently asked when meeting someone new is “So, how do you like living in Portugal?”. It’s also something I’m repeatedly asked when I visit my Polish home or friends in the UK, and despite my efforts to give as exhaustive answer as possible (for it really isn’t a matter of a simple “yeah it’s great” or…

I happen to be one of those people who enjoy working from home. I have no problem with discipline, motivation, or solitude — in fact, I probably focus best when I’m alone. But working from home, as I’ve discovered over a number of years (and apartments), only works when you have a studio: a special place dedicated just to art….

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting a friend in Berlin and on a Sunday afternoon found myself in Prenzlauer Berg, sitting at a lovely place with a somewhat ironic name, given how left-wing the city is, the Kapitalist Café. I was sitting there with a glass of wine, an oldskul notebook and a head full of thoughts and…

Photo by Patrycja Mic Last weekend, I took part in a conference called Element Talks, dedicated to practical aspects of working as a designer. The event, this year in its 3rd edition (though the first one to be held in Warsaw, the previous two were in Poznań), attracted hundreds of people, including students, professionals, as well as commercial and non-profit companies…

Imagine that you’ve been diagnosed with a terminal disease. What would be the one thing you would want to do that would make you accept your fate? One thing, one project, one goal that would make you feel more at ease with dying because you would have accomplished it? A goal that has simply been the sense of your life?…

“(…) How very trying I was—all agog, all aquiver; and so full of storms and rhapsodies…” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1936 in a letter to Violet Dickinson, her older friend and correspondent. This and many other letters can be found at an exhibition devoted to the life of Woolf which is currently on at the National Portrait Gallery. “Storms and…

What inspired me to write this post are two seemingly unrelated things I saw recently: a friend’s website and a documentary film. The website was created using Adobe Muse. The documentary film was about sign painters, released through the Creative Bundle. These two completely different discoveries both led me to ask the same question: a question about the role of…

I was giving a lecture to students at Vassar not long ago. Working with the students’ autobiographies, I invited a dance student, a music student who brought his saxophone, and an art student to join me on stage. I asked the dancer to improvise some movement from a tuck position on the floor. I asked the saxophone player to accompany…

“I find it difficult  to write each day, but if I don’t I’m swamped with guilt. Where does the compunction come from?,” wrote Derek Jarman in a diary he started after moving to the Prospect Cottage on the bleak coast of industrial Dungeness. The diary, called Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, was first published by Century in 1991, three years…