Corey Helford Gallery presents ‘Happiness is Easy’ by Ewa Prończuk-Kuziak

Prończuk-Kuziak’s oil paintings are a combination of still life, nature and fantasy. She creates rainbow-colored visions of animals that are made of materials, as if woven out of thread and decorative fabrics. Building on contrast, they are full of life, energy, and fantasy, always idealized in their complicated nature and continuous transformation. In her works, Ewa uses intensely saturated colors, which illustrate the vibrancy of the world her characters inhabit.

Happiness is Easy is a continuation of Prończuk-Kuziak’s True Colors show and is composed of 17 new oil paintings depicting short stories and reality snapshots which all have one thing in common – happiness. Prończuk-Kuziak shares, “With time, I saw that True Colors was all about hope: hope for luck, and inner peace. The show attempted to communicate, that even for misfortune, life goes on, that a night is followed by a day, and the sun comes out after every storm. The newest series of my works, now, describe happiness and finding it in perverse ways. Happiness is a very subjective concept and on the individual level, is often extremely difficult to reach despite being the most important and crucial need for all mankind. People can try to reach it for all their lives and find it in the most unexpected or strange places, situations, people, or moments.”

Prończuk-Kuziak further muses, “Would happiness be finding peace or balance in places or in a person which we thought of as a threat? Would we experience happiness if we simply let go, slow down, and step down without a feeling of regret? Maybe, happiness is allowing oneself to experience extreme emotions and not being embarrassed by them. Happiness, in my opinion, is dancing, laughing, silence, and freedom. It often happens when you pull yourself together after loss, tragedy, and difficult moments, giving yourself time to withdraw from your social life and observe in silence. Happiness is allowing yourself to experience fear, and courage, stepping outside the comfort zone. It is carelessness, ease, self-control, and harmony. For years, poets, artists, philosophers, and scientists dealt with these concepts: tried to describe it and find its source. Still, there is no single definition and that’s the beauty of it. I simply gather stories, process them into surreal paintings, and let them live on.”