An Emotional Landscape Between Memory and Invention
Kasia Frankowicz’s art does not merely reflect her past—it refracts it through vivid color, aching sentiment, and a fluid relationship with truth. Born in Western Sydney and now working in Melbourne’s north, Frankowicz brings a complex identity to the canvas: she is a Polish-Australian daughter of refugees, shaped by inherited trauma, resilience, and the imagined fragments of a home she has never fully known. Rather than documenting her past with forensic precision, she leans into feeling, using emotional resonance as her guide. Her work exists in that uncertain territory where personal memory morphs into shared myth, and fact surrenders to the raw force of recollection. Through this lens, she explores how we make meaning from the contradictions in our histories.
What distinguishes Frankowicz is not simply her technical approach or visual style, but the emotional conviction behind every piece. She revisits formative experiences with an unflinching honesty—those marked by familial turbulence, cultural dislocation, and flashes of joy that, in hindsight, feel sharpened by the ache of nostalgia. Rather than portraying pain outright, she expresses it through symbols, color fields, and narrative fragments that invite viewers into a deeply personal yet universally relatable space. Her connection to her cultural heritage is simultaneously tender and unstable, often expressed not as certainty but as a yearning for something just out of reach. This ambiguity becomes her strength, allowing her work to remain open-ended and emotionally generous.
Even in moments of humor or lightness, there is a vulnerability to Frankowicz’s practice. Her reflections on memory, particularly from childhood and adolescence, carry a duality: warmth tinged with sorrow, clarity blurred by time. Whether drawing inspiration from family snapshots or the faded logic of Y2K-era fears, she engages memory not as static record but as living material, ever-shifting. In this way, her work becomes a kind of emotional archaeology, uncovering not just what happened, but how it felt—and why it still matters.
Kasia Frankowicz: Art as an Inherited Instinct
To Frankowicz, the label “artist” feels both heavy and overly prescribed—a term burdened by expectation and misconception. Though she acknowledges it forms part of her online identity, she resists the notion that artistry is a profession to be adopted or earned. Instead, she views it as a birthright, a human impulse as natural and essential as breathing. In this view, everyone is an artist, whether they wield a brush or not. Art, for her, is less about technical skill than it is about bearing witness: to one’s life, to one’s internal chaos, and to the desire to be remembered. This egalitarian philosophy shapes both her creative practice and her understanding of why people make things at all.
Frankowicz’s visual style embraces the aesthetics of simplicity and emotional clarity. Influenced by artists like Henri Matisse and David Hockney, as well as traditions in naive art and folkloric symbolism, her compositions often feature bold lines, saturated colors, and symbolic imagery drawn from everyday life. Yet behind the apparent brightness lies a more complex emotional charge. The themes she revisits—longing, fragmentation, belonging—are not straightforward narratives but mood-driven investigations into how the past lingers. Nostalgia becomes both a subject and a medium, coloring even the most benign memories with a subtle ache. Her work resists sentimentality by maintaining emotional tension, capturing the bittersweetness of remembering too much and too vividly.
Animals also play a significant role in her practice, not simply as subjects but as emotional anchors. Having grown up with animals as sources of comfort during turbulent times, Frankowicz continues to find in them a grounding presence. Their unspoken loyalty and instinctual warmth provide contrast to the complexity of human relationships she explores elsewhere in her work. A lyric from The Fauves’ song “Dogs Are the Best People” encapsulates this perfectly for her: “His love comes free and unconditionally.” This perspective reveals how small, everyday interactions—often overlooked—can carry deep emotional weight. These gentle details elevate her paintings, offering quiet moments of connection amid larger explorations of identity and loss.
Painting Through Time’s Fog: Color, Texture, and Vulnerability
Frankowicz’s chosen mediums speak directly to her process and sensibility. Working primarily in acrylic allows her to respond instinctively to the stories that surface from within. The immediacy of acrylic aligns with her need to capture emotions in their rawest, most immediate state. Yet her works are rarely finished in one sitting. Over the base layers, she applies oil pastel to introduce texture, warmth, and a childlike sincerity that aligns with the themes of nostalgia and fragmented memory. This combination of materials mirrors the duality of her narratives: fast but layered, impulsive but emotionally intricate. The use of pastel softens the intensity, inviting viewers into a space that feels both intimate and unguarded.
Among her works, one painting titled 1999 stands out as particularly significant. Based on an old family photograph of herself diving into a pool, it captures a moment loaded with personal tension and transformation. The year itself holds meaning—an age of adolescent uncertainty, fears of the impending Y2K apocalypse, and complex family dynamics. Frankowicz recalls the emotional intensity of that time: listening to bands like Silverchair and Red Hot Chili Peppers, crying over imagined endings, yet somehow believing in the magic of the ordinary. The painting is more than a nostalgic snapshot; it becomes a vessel for everything unspoken between her past self and the adult artist she has become. In her words, what once felt like the worst time was, paradoxically, the best—because soon after, everything grew harder.
The act of revisiting this image decades later demonstrates the emotional excavation that underpins her practice. Frankowicz does not seek resolution but rather understanding. The painting becomes a dialogue across time, layered with the awareness that hindsight offers. Her relationship with her father, her body, and the cultural myths of the late ’90s all converge in this single image. By capturing such a fleeting moment and infusing it with so much emotional density, she invites viewers to reconsider their own formative memories and the contradictions they carry. 1999 becomes a quiet monument to what was lost, what survived, and what still haunts the edges of memory.
Kasia Frankowicz: Emotional Timing and Creative Surrender
Frankowicz approaches each day in the studio not with a rigid plan but with emotional intuition as her compass. With a backlog of ideas constantly vying for her attention, choosing where to begin can feel like its own challenge. She works from the inside out, relying on her emotional state to dictate which piece she’s ready to tackle. This attunement to internal readiness is central to her creative rhythm. If a piece feels wrong, she stops immediately—not out of frustration, but from a deep understanding that emotional misalignment can ruin the work. Sometimes the abandoned piece will wait quietly for its moment, returning later to become a favorite. This ebb and flow reveals a creative process built on surrender rather than control, patience rather than pressure.
This method demands a high level of emotional honesty. Frankowicz must be willing to walk away from an idea if it doesn’t sit right, even if the concept excites her intellectually. Her sensitivity to mood and memory means that each painting requires a specific internal atmosphere to thrive. Forcing a piece risks distorting its essence. She respects the fragility of her own inspiration, knowing that some images need time to mature emotionally before they can take shape visually. This slow incubation allows her work to maintain its integrity, rooted not in performative productivity but in authentic emotional engagement. It’s a process that respects the subconscious, making space for feelings to surface in their own time.
Looking ahead, Frankowicz is driven less by rigid goals than by a desire to stay present with the emotional content that calls to her. The next project is always quietly forming, waiting for its moment to demand attention. Whether drawing from old family photos, passing memories, or new emotional discoveries, her practice remains rooted in sincerity. There’s an openness in her work, a refusal to fabricate neat resolutions or polished narratives. Instead, she captures the messy, beautiful in-betweens—the almosts, the might-have-beens, the things we feel before we can name them. This ongoing commitment to truth, however blurred or tender, keeps her art urgent, resonant, and unmistakably her own.
