This is how I enter 2026.
This is the energy. Boots on the ground, literally.
Stomping the old and making sure 2026 hears me, because there is no small talk I’m willing to entertain, and no little wounds.
I say—God, the One *—give it to me, all of it: big, beautiful, loud, optimistic, tender but voracious, expansive but deep, like a ladder to heavens—vertical, stable. Give me more more more years as there is so many books to read, so many books to write (I completed the first chapter of my novella), so many paintings to paint, so many coffees and bourbons to drink, so many letters to write, so much washi tapes to overuse, so many intoxicating perfumes to drawn myself in, so many index cards to file, so many pens to ink, hanstands to improve, so many trips to Poland, again and again, to see my dad, who will live so many more years, who must, who will.
Please.
Kindly, Marta.
The one thing I am dropping this year is any remnant of fast. 2026 will be a year of slow and deep: slow mornings, going vertical with people and ideas, long hours with a book and a brush, and a specific practice I’d like you to learn from me at some point, so stay tuned.
Where I write and reach no conclusions.
Me in a Georgia-esque hat, in Salem for the Georgia exhibition.
I saw Georgia O’Keeffe in Salem, and the paintings felt less like images than like insistences. The petals were confrontational; they opened so wide they became landscapes rather than flowers.
What stayed with me was her severity. The sensuality is there, but stripped of excess. Every curve feels chosen, necessary. A petal becomes a landscape, then a body, then something calmer than both.
Georgia was a fashionista before the word "fashionista " even knew what it was. Flowing robes, wide-brimmed hats—she moved through New York as if the street were an extension of the canvas. Style as refusal. She stayed anchored to one pursuit only: beauty, deprived of apology.
The true aesthete.
Astrologically, she reads as fixed water—depth-seeking, loyal to intensity, craving permanence, rather than comfort. With Sun, Mercury, and Jupiter entangled around a compromised Venus, and Mars in command, desire becomes unruly rather than pleasing. This Venus does not soften edges and speak pretty; she veers. A maverick force that answers to no social choreography. It is the same independence that shaped her life and her work: a woman who did not decorate the world, but entered it on her own terms and made it hold still.
Her Astrology analysis is coming.
My series, Bloomlands, comes from that same urge. I’m not interested in flowers as symbols but as moments of exposure. Or states of being. To stretch a detail until it turns psychological or, better yet, philosophical. To let softness be precise. If there is an influence, it’s the permission to make intimacy vast, and to trust that inside a single bloom, there is already an entire world. And I am in there, as a paniter. And you, the viewer or a collector, join me.
Voda | 30x40 in | Collect Here.
Interestingly, Voda, in Polish, means water (woda)
Since I shared Vivaldi Winter above, I must link the whole concert because it is like nothing you’ve experienced. And it is Polish, which makes my knees even weaker. The stomping is so assertive—like Poland in all wars—never stopped hoping and fighting. Paweł Zalejski, being handsome, doesn’t hurt.
Clarice Lispector did not leave much about Vivaldi in the way she did about Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, or silence. But when she mentions music in her chronicles and interviews, she consistently distinguishes between music that imposes order and music that exposes inner rupture. Bach, for her, is a mathematician; Mozart is the impersonal divine. Based on her writing, Vivaldi appears more associated with ornament, repetition, and exterior structure rather than existential risk. And I love both sides of the argument.
Other Internet Love plucked from the Garden of e-Delights:
Just two links today.
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One of the movies about Georgia,
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The other book.
What I’m working on, studio bits.
I have a lot going on; some projects are self-initiated, some commissioned.
I’ll give you a preview of what I’m planning in Tangents #3, but suffice it to say that I’m craving physical connections.
First, we need to iron out the dresses, pull out the tights and hats, and raise a glass to the 2025 New Year’s Eve festivity.
May it be a night of hysterical laughter, jiggly dances, crazy lovers, and the kind of conversations that lounge in memory forever.
From me, to You.
It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.
~ Georgia O’Keeffe
