This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of At Cooper magazine.

Four years ago my body needed to make a drawing. My father had just died, and I was still grappling with everything that his transition meant. So I went back to drawing—a quiet, familiar place to be still and not know. That is what pulls me to my work again and again—time in a nonverbal flow, a space of pause, exploration, of being with whatever is there.

The drawing that emerged then offered me an image of my father’s life and its connection to mine. I drew 27,297 dots, one for each day he had been alive, 16,061 of them red to mark the time we shared from the day I was born. The completed piece was a physical manifestation of something my mind was trying to make sense of—I needed an image of what it had meant for him to be here, his journey through time, and this raw visualization felt helpful. Decades as a graphic designer have taught me that we need to see things in order to understand and feel them more deeply.

In both my art and design projects, I’ve spent years honing my skills and focusing on elaborate finished work, so never in my wildest dreams could I have predicted that my creative life would crack open with a series of simple marks that anyone with a pen could make. But this is exactly what happened, and this first drawing marked the beginning of an evolving body of work that explores how the simplest drawing techniques can convey the most complex spectrum of experiences we move through in life. My own journey with my father’s death has given birth to a growing series of commissioned drawings that capture life journeys that have either come to an end or are still unfolding, changing, or even just beginning. As the series continues to expand, the types of marks that find their way into my work are evolving as well, and more recent drawings are increasingly more intricate as I dive into the paradoxes of my own life and inner emotional landscape.

As an artistic spirit who delights in the rigors of math and information design, I have always been fascinated by the dualities of human experience—my work allows me to explore them visually. Even my most pristine drawings are exhibited alongside raw sketchbook pages of sloppy process behind each piece. Like the tangled back of an exquisite tapestry, both sides are part of one whole. That’s one of the things I learned so deeply at Cooper—that I don’t have to choose between being an artist and a graphic designer, between being a painter and a nerd—all of the multifaceted aspects of who I am as a creative being can and should coexist and feed each other, and the work will follow suit.

Today, when we can all make images using AI and other digital tools, what is the value or meaning of a drawing that I’m making by hand? For me, it comes down to one core thing—the way it feels to make a piece, every step in the process of making—that’s why I make the work that I make. To be in that endless ebb and flow of change, of not knowing what comes next, with all the curveballs, the pitfalls, and moments of breakthrough, all intertwined. Making work allows me to embody my life more deeply—from death, to birth, and everything in between.

School of Art graduate Agnieszka Gasparska is an artist, designer, and the creative director of Kiss Me I’m Polish, a New York-based design studio she founded in 2004. To see more of her work, inquire about an existing piece, or request a custom commission, please visit:

sublimeordinary.com
Instagram: @sublimeordinary
Email: gniszk@gmail.com