A Galesburg artist, Basia Krol, will have her work on display at Eat Paint Studio in Chicago.

The exhibition "Wildering" opens with a reception from 6-9 p.m. May 7. The exhibition will run through June 11 at the studio located at 5036 N. Lincoln Ave. in the Lincoln Avenue North Arts District.

Working as a special education paraprofessional in Galesburg Schools, Krol was temporarily sidelined when schools closed in 2020. Krol suddenly had time and  opportunity to re-focus on her painting.

“When COVID came, everyone experienced loss and isolation. I developed a sense of urgency like I had never experienced before. It’s like a Heideggerian existential shift: the act of being intensified by lurking nothingness,” Krol said. 

According to a release from Eat Paint Studio, "Wildering" describes a re-awakening of self-identity through active observation of nature. Painted largely during the pandemic, Krol finds a grounding connection in the landscape of central Illinois.

Krol was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland. She studied painting and printmaking at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.

More:Acclaimed jazz drummer Matt Wilson to headline Knox-Rootabaga Jazz Festival May 3-7

Her new appreciation for landscape painting began after a trip to the Indiana Dunes in June of 2020. She became entranced by a bog in the distance; the reflected sunlight creating a sheen of white and silver over the water, dead trees standing in stark relief as black, almost figure-like, markers of space. She returned to her studio and quickly created her first bog painting, similar to “White Bog (Pink).” Having painted figures and symbolic or magical realist works in the recent past, the urge to paint this almost primeval scene became a reclamation of landscape painting.

“I guess I went back to landscapes when I was ready to paint landscapes,” she said.

Over the last two years, Krol has been working almost exclusively from scenes she has photographed of Indiana Dunes Park and Woodland View farm, where the owners created a vast prairie restoration. While photographs act as a resource and reference for her studio work, it is through meditation and being present to her experience of nature that Krol is able to create the sense of connection to the natural world communicated in her painting. 

More:'A treasure hunt for art and craft supplies': Yours 2 Create opens March 10 in Galesburg

Contemplation of the land, its cycles and seasons, are fundamental to Krol’s latest body of work. In the painting, “Into the Golden Woods,” a canopy of golden leaves leads the viewer toward a secluded view of rocky earth and tree limbs bordering a clear creek which reflects the sky. The scene is charged with a sense of mystery, softly levitating strokes of yellow and pale green leaves suggest an open invitation to be present in the now. The trees in Krol’s work could be read as conduits, connecting land and sky, bearing witness to change and the passage of time, their limbs gently leading us toward the wildering and un-knowing places where a deeper sense of acceptance and renewal can be found. 

Krol's work can be see here.