Anita Nowinska found her long-forgotten box of pastels while rummaging through a battered suitcase, using only a candle for light as her power was cut out. “By candlelight I created my first flower painting,” she recalls. “As I painted, I found the deep distress, sadness and pain I was feeling disappear.” That single act, she says, “saved me; healed me and gave me a sense of purpose.” It was not, as she puts it, the straightest of career paths. As a precocious eight-year-old, Anita was invited to study alongside a master’s group under the Polish painter Marian Bogusz-Szyszko. “It wouldn’t be allowed these days,” she says, “eight grown men and an eight-year-old girl!” Her mother, indulgent, bought her oil paints and an easel; her father, less so, frequently destroyed her…
