75 Projects

Health issue: Opioid addiction in young adults

Piece: Lustro [Mirror] – Tomasz Kowalski

Standing at Tomasz Kowalski’s “Lustro [Mirror]” in the Stanley Art Museum, I found myself stopped in a strange, liminal space between clarity and ambiguity, peace and darkness. This was the painting that most strongly reminded me of the delicate line between opioid addiction and recovery. It conveys a haunting vulnerability, with a muted palette softly depicting unheard struggle that audiences may never understand. The abstract female figures blur into their surroundings, which immediately made me think of how addiction dissolves into the victim and their environment. Their faces—gaunt, hollow, yet strangely tender—speak to a profound disconnection that is both internal and external.

The central figure, with her soft yellow-orange heart-shaped form below her, became for me a powerful symbol of retained humanity. Despite the painting’s overall sense of disconnection, she remains anchored and most clearly depicted. Her gaze towards the other figure in the foreground felt like a moment of unexpected compassion, almost maternal-like, as opposed to the blunter figure to her left. The other figure juxtaposes the central figure’s quality—she is dressed in stark black, with a strong and serious posture that reminded me more of death and destruction, perhaps the grim reaper. I interpreted it in terms of opioid addiction that beneath the horrific and dark parts of trauma lies a deeply human story of connection and potential healing.

The painting’s haziness really seemed to mirror the lived experience of those struggling with opioid addiction. It’s not a clear-cut journey, but a blurred passage through uncertain terrain. The other transparent and ghostly figures passing through the scene strongly remind me of the urban landscape aspect of addiction—people moving alongside each other, simultaneously present and absent, unaware of the personal battles happening all around them and within them.

My own attempt to sketch the painting revealed its complexity. The harder I tried to capture its precise details of the figures’ abstract facial expressions, the more they seemed to slip away. It was frustrating and slow, much like the elusive nature of addiction recovery. Each attempt left me with a sense of overall artistic incompleteness, a reflection of how addiction resists simple narratives or quick resolutions. Everything in the process of recreating this piece only strengthened my interpretation of just how it represented this health issue.

Visiting the Stanley Art Museum became more than just an artistic exploration, just as it was when we visited for class. It became a space of profound empathy for me, within my own experiences, and within the health issue I was intending to represent. The piece by Kowalski gave me a little healing within myself. It was incredibly validating to feel the way he depicted peace that comes with traumatic experiences, and the haziness/disconnect of human emotion and experience. Redrawing it, even though it turned out terrible, allowed me to sit with some discomfort in mistakes, inadequacy, or something far greater like addiction, to recognize the humanity that persists even in moments of great fragmentation. The end result of my visual interpretation did less for me than the act of studying it and the process of attempting to recreate it.

The painting’s earthy tones—browns and greens with hints of red and peach—spoke to me of decay and renewal, like the raw struggle of addiction. In my opinion, these colors represented how recovery is not about complete transformation to be fully “better”, but about maintaining connection to one’s fundamental humanity. I feel that was the greatest takeaway from visiting the Stanley, viewing art pieces like Kowalski’s do not necessarily fix us, “heal” us, but help us to understand and validate our own human experiences as shared and collective.

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