Paulina Swietliczko paints bold, colorful scenes of everyday life in her basement studio, where she also teaches art classes.
For Paulina Swietliczko, living in America was never part of the plan.
Paris? Perhaps. Poland? Well, Poland was her birthplace. Warsaw is where Swietliczko expected she would paint and fall in love and raise her family and paint some more.
But life had other ideas.
What began as a trip to Los Angeles on summer break from university became a globe-trotting romance, a marriage to a Californian, a move to Roanoke.
For many years, Swietliczko still believed she might return to Poland for more than just vacation. But as her two girls got older and her family felt more rooted in Roanoke, as the political winds changed both in Poland and the United States, as Swietliczko made inroads in the local art scene, she found herself more ready to stay.
So ready that this spring she completed the paperwork to become an American citizen.
“After all these years, I finally decided that it’s time to become a citizen,” says Swietliczko, talking in the dining room of her ranch house in Southwest Roanoke. “It would be nice to be able to vote. It would be good to be able to be more responsible for the place I live.”
And she wouldn’t have quite as much trepidation when she traveled through international airports, she says.
Swietliczko was 23 when she booked a flight to LAX to see a new corner of the world — and visit her mother, who was living in California for a few years. It would be a break from her long days at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she was midway through a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree program.
While there, she signed up for English classes and some fellow students invited her to a University of California, Los Angeles, party. She met a cute undergrad named Jacob Lee. In the weeks that followed, she kept on meeting him.
“We would chase each other through Los Angeles, because we were both a little disorganized,” Swietliczko laughs. “We would tell each other, ‘I’ll meet you here,’ but someone would be late. So we’d end up at that one cafe where we always met.”
Both of them still had years of school to go. But they made it work: summers in Poland, traveling together on breaks. Once they graduated, it was decision time. Lee chose to pursue a master’s degree in Computer Science at Fresno State University. Swietliczko followed him.
They were married in 2005. But for months, Swietliczko could not work — or even get a driver’s license — as she waited on her green card. So she turned an extra room in their apartment into a studio. And she painted.
Even after she could get a job, her degree from a Polish university, her professional connections halfway around the world, didn’t open any doors. She was feeling a little stranded until … in 2006, she won an artist-in-residence spot at Fresno Art Museum.
That position led to teaching jobs at Fresno City College (painting and drawing and art appreciation). Then came along daughter Helena and in a few years, daughter Matylda. Lee finished his degree and landed work at what was in 2012 a start-up Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic collaboration for biomedical research.
Those first years in Roanoke were some of Swietliczko’s toughest. She was home with two preschoolers; she didn’t know a soul; their apartment was too small for her to paint. Her Polish accent raised more questions in Virginia than it ever had in California.
But, day-by-day, she found her circle: parents in her daughters’ school communities and swim teams; Lee’s work colleagues at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC; other artists working in the area.
Over the last few years, Swietliczko has exhibited her paintings and drawings at Alexander/Heath Contemporary art gallery in downtown Roanoke and at the 2019 Juried Biennial at Roanoke College’s Olin Hall galleries. She has three drawings in A Metro-Mountain Adventure art show at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Her work is included in the Artemis Journal 2019. She’s working on a commissioned portrait this summer. She has taught art to children in the Roanoke County schools and, currently, she teaches elementary school-age students on Sunday afternoons in her home studio.
But Swietliczko has two sisters and a gaggle of nieces and nephews and her mother and dozens of friends still living in and around Warsaw. Her family resides together in a suburb outside of Warsaw, her mother’s bodega-type store out front while her residence and Swietliczko’s sisters’ houses sit farther back on the property.
Swietliczko and her girls travel each summer to this swirl of cousins and doting grandma and fun. None of them ever wants to return to Roanoke, to school and work and responsibilities.
But each time Swietliczko’s plane touches down, Roanoke feels a little less like a place she has landed and a little more like a place she wants to live.
“I think that if you have a community, then you have home,” she says. “Because otherwise, even if you have a house and a car, you’re still an outsider. But if you have a group of people you interact with and if you have someone you can talk to, it feels more like you’re at home.”
About the Writer:
Christina Nifong is a writer with a decades-long career profiling interesting people, places and ideas. She’s also a committed locavore and mother to three kids, four chickens and one very sweet kitty. Find more of her work at christinanifong.com.
