Polish spray painter Stachu Szumski creates massive murals, surreal paintings that are visually farway from his classic graffiti heritage. Combining his passion to live corals with his passion to decaying buildings, he surrounds the viewers with spaces that have taken an afterlife. I hope you are amazed by his work as much as I did.

Your work seems so intricate and detailed, it seems like you've got such a sharp eye even machine-like, yet you incorporate a lot of natural scenery of growth and decay in your pieces. Would you agree with that? would you like to elaborate whether this is conscious? what and who are you inspired by?

I mostly am inspired by the space I’m about to work in. I carefully search for specific surroundings that will become an integral part of my work; spaces such as abandoned offices or factories, dehumanized spaces I like to call them, which are one of my main creative playgrounds. I grew up in Lower Silesia area in Poland which is full of falling apart buildings, mostly postindustrial. The energy flowing from the decomposing industrial architecture brings me to an creative, unreal state. I guess growing up in that landscape might have brought me to the point of visual explorations I’m currently in. In the life cycle of such buildings, I become a sort of a creative decomposer. The detail mania often appearing in my paintings can be referred to imaginary of the sub-visible such as all the microstructures that surrounds us.

If you are interested to share with our readers - could you tell us what do you imagine while making? what associations does your working process and outcome bring about in your mind?

It really depends on what I’m working on; I work with a multidimensional approach of which I shift according to my subject. Sometimes I voice a specific narration that has to do with a historical context, and then my projects become research based. I can divide my works into those that deal with a specific part of reality that interests me and are a sort of comment or outcome of an observation, and others that are less strict and based on improvisation where each step of the process determines another where I'm never sure about the outcome. I guess that is the most exciting part of my painting practice, those moments that accumulate my biggest use of imagination.

Did you study art and did you enjoy it? If you didn't study art, how did you acquire such skill? when did you start doing graffiti? (if that is how you would name it).

I developed a sort of autonomous painting language in high school, after I studied at New Media Art faculty at academy of fine arts in Warsaw; my studies lasted for 3 years of which I didn't very much enjoy unfortunately, because, ever since being a child, I had a problem with the oppression of education systems. Fortunately, it didn't affect my painting practice at all, more the opposite – it encouraged me to start exploring different media in art. Therefore, I never learned how to paint academically. The origins of my creative exploration are rooted in graffiti which I cultivate to this day in its pure, brutal form. I have fallen in love with spraying paint over surfaces, It’s been already around 12 years since I started painting graffiti.

It seems like you have quite a range of scales and a big amount of work; as an artist myself, I struggle narrowing down my ideas into a coherent story. Could you possibly advise me and our readers on a method that might have helped overcome such conflicts of what to include or not, and also, when do you know when to stop thinking and start making?

I usually trust primal intuitions, so I let my impulse dictate the direction of my project, at least in the beginning. Also, the only positive thing studying academically brought to my practice was the need to conceptualize my works more; From a very abstract “floating” theme based on intuition I was pushed to precisely declare what my practice is stating. So, I started treating my projects like quests, and thanks to that I mobilized myself from what I was used to - I reduced painting for a while and started searching for different ways of expression by using different mediums. What I especially enjoyed during that process was the research part; I was obliged to dig out the roots of my topics and then carefully rethink the way the outcome should be visualized. I had to figure out how the medium serves my concept. It has been already a few years since I quit school and I guess I'm slowly coming back to my previous path in which I feel the biggest freedom – the lack of academic criticism and censorship allows the creative forces recover.

What are you mostly passionate about?

Besides painting, I guess my biggest passion is to observe coral reefs. I don't do it often, but I try my best to do so at least once a year, I find a place somewhere nearby to surround myself with live corals. A few years ago I became interested in geology and geo-history after finding a fossilized coral in eastern Poland. There was a shallow tropical sea in upper Devonian area covering our country, that was rich with coral reefs. Such view gives me great satisfaction and I find myself reflecting about the temporality of the human kind; corals are hundreds of millions years old and I am pretty sure they will colonize the see’s after the extinction of the human kind. My other passion, which is constantly growing, is historical too. I am into archaic traces of human notification, such as extinct alphabet letters from early civilizations.

Would you say your work is separated from your life, as if in a parallel world or is it seamlessly connected? do you think you need a different state of mind to produce work from that of your daily state of mind? in other words, do you prepare yourself mentally to paint and need to find focus or is it intuitive?

I treat art as a fully integrated part of my daily life; the more I get into the flow of working, the more the border between them is vanishing, art is reality anyway. I split my approach to art into two different perspectives: the logical and the irrational. In the logical dimension are the elements observed in reality such as historical topics, geological observations, basically the process of acquiring knowledge about our planet which I segregate slowly in my mind. In the irrational dimension, there is pure intuition and a sort of fission from reality. For that state of mind, I just need to paint and I flow into it. Separate myself from any distracting stimulus is important and happens naturally as I undergo the improvisation process.

You are welcome to tell us some more of your thoughts that are important for you to share.

I want to wish for everyone to not lose their minds in these broken times. I'm stuck on Java in Indonesia right now, on an art residency in place called Sesama. My friend recently had a conversation with local Kejawen (javanese sufism) master, who was working as an advisor for Nasa and he predicts that human kind will ethically evolve in next 100 years (which may mean the end of capitalism ?) He also mentioned, that there will be some massive volcano eruption comparable to Krakatau one from 1883 that will cover most of the globe with volcanic dust. I deeply hope that the populistic era will collapse sometime soon due to his prediction.