ABOUT

I

see the possibilities for Light Painting everywhere, which keeps me up late most nights dreaming of ways to introduce the technique to a greater audience of content creators, entrepreneurs and academics, organizations and institutions, other artists, performers, athletes, and adventurers, learners and the insatiably curious of all ages and abilities.

I

t seems pre-destined that I would use light as my medium and the darkness as my canvas. Born a first generation Polish American, my surname Wilczynski derives from the word wilk meaning “wolf”. And the Slavic and Greek origins for Alina mean “light.”

My fantasy-adventure namesake Alina, in the novel and Netflix series Shadow and Bone, comes to realize she possesses a superpower, the ability to summon light! My superpower, if I were to call one, seems to be summoning the light from others.

It started with a question, a wish of sorts. How can I use art to help others feel the energy, the living history and the cultural significance of historical places, people and things in order to encourage community-driven efforts to save them?

Light Painting came to mind and in the moment I started drafting ideas, after nearly 30 years since first learning the technique in college, I was struck by the realization that literally everything about Light Painting has changed! And mainly in just the past few years with the advent of new and newly accessible sources of light and light-sensitive technology that have made what’s possible with the technique literally open to infinity.

In the several years since my earliest experiments, this work has led to projects with movements artists, athletes, motorsport drivers, scientists and business owners. Who all quickly realize the same thing within the creative process. There is a essence to what they do that no one else has been able express with them in this way before… this deeply, with the level of meaning, purpose, insight and emotional connection that we are able to generate together with this medium.

The results speak volumes for themselves. But to know “why” this medium reaches such depths within us, as I see it, is to subscribe to the idea that every action, thought and imagining — as energy and as light — creates trails of who we are at our core, all around us at all times. Consider that the expansion of this energy over time intertwines with every other action, thought and imagining of all others around us, at all times, back towards our origin of self and forever into the future. Now, you can imagine, as I do, that all of space around us, is far from empty. It is full of vibrancy, color and kinetic activity.

With an inward vision, if we allow ourselves to explore what this observed light and color might look like, the act (and art) of sharing our work, our research, passions and our dreams takes on an entirely new form.

As I am observing, the more deeply our experience of wonderment and curiosity, the easier it is to connect to the essence and freedom of who we are through movement. Tapping into what it feels like to innovate and create, to play and to resonate emotionally with music and other art forms is the formula to creating wild tapestries in light that go far beyond what we’ve seen with our physical eyes before.

The applications for this work are truly endless. I’ve been approached by lighting professionals, theaters and performers, to be expected. But also by a drug and alcohol adult rehabilitation center, a facilitator working with children on the spectrum, a private equity firm specializing in next-gen medical science inventions, as well as libraries and civics groups. This tells me we are onto something.

Photograph by Miranda Gatewood

I

t was through Light Painting that I was invited to become an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Farmingdale State College (SUNY), as well as lead workshops and immersive Light Painting demonstrations in recent years.

In 2023-2024, and again for 2024-2025, I was accepted into the Patchogue Arts Council PEACE (Partners in Education, Arts, & Community Empowerment) Project which is funded by the US Department of Education and partners with Eastern Suffolk BOCES in order to bring educators, artists and cultural partners together to foster college- and career-readiness, civic engagement, DEI and social-emotional learning through the arts.

An aspect of showing and teaching this work that has been the most fascinating thing for me to observe, is that viewers understand on a very deep level that they are getting an insider’s view of something. Most of what I am seeing in this medium is abstraction, which I love doing as well, but what drives my exploratory work is a desire to tap into what passion, wonderment and inspiration feel like, look like… in light + color + movement.

I

t started at the age of seven when my brother and I crafted a pinhole camera out of a cereal box and wrapped it with enough black duct tape to send it to the moon. We slipped an expired roll of film found in the back of a drawer into the box, counted to 10 and anxiously asked for a ride to the local pharmacy to get it developed. Exactly one fuzzy landscape photo of our backyard was enough to seal the deal on a lifelong love.

After taking photography in college with an SLR I borrowed from her sister, I took over the basement of my family home for a makeshift darkroom created with hand-me-down equipment from a cousin. Self-confessed night owl, I would spend countless hours experimenting with my favorite camera technique… Light Painting in the dark.

After college, I shifted my career focus to commercial art and design, becoming a founding partner in a boutique design agency in Northern NJ.

Throughout my commercial career however, I continued to exhibit fine art photography in galleries throughout the NYC-Metro area including SUNY Utica Gallery, Bethune Gallery (NYC), Leslie Lohman Gallery (NYC), and others. A solo exhibit at The NYC LGBT Center spanned several rooms over two floors as one of several featured exhibits in a series of Pride Month installations presented throughout Manhattan by The New York Public Library.

My brother and I on the back porch

My Photography Professor Klaus Schnitzer

O

ver the course of 25+ years in the commercial arts realm, I’ve designed, photographed and/or directed campaigns for clients — corporate to mom & pop, non-profits to municipalities to cabaret singers — including M&M/Mars, Robin Hood Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts, LOGO Channel, Sierra Club, Town of Southampton, Costume Designer Eric Winterling, Tony-Award Winning Sound Designer Clive Goodwin, Pioneering Executive Coach Trisha Scudder and Plus-Size Model Emme.

I’ve also organized and/or photographed events featuring entrepreneurs and executives, filmmakers and playwrights, authors, artists and athletes at venues big and small, including MoMA, Asia Society & Museum, American Folk Art Museum and various galleries, boardrooms and backyards.

W

hen I received my BFA in Fine Arts, I imagined I would find a commercial field that would afford an ambitious and profitable career with the flexibility to continue to create and exhibit art “on the side,” as well as train for endurance cycling and travel the world. I achieved this vision and a ton more when I co-founded a boutique design agency a few years after graduating, but it’s impossible to stand still in a moving work field, especially in the communication arts. As the design field has gone through several clean sweeps of technological and style changes, one constant in my life remained… art photography. And something in me kept urging me to lean in this direction.

As time — and timing — is often our best advocate in life, all of my career experience working with clients of every profession, background and perspective, has not only fed my insatiable curiosity but it has provided a platform on which to build skills in design, commercial photography and videography, marketing, brand messaging, website design, projection art and teaching, which have all prepared me for the present moment and work that is more purposeful, meaningful and life-giving than I could ever have imagined.

All culminating and converging to a focused point of what I feel this work is about, and that is wow-ing the unsuspecting into the art-making process… facilitating a moment of discovery often with explosive reactions in their realization that they were the ones who made wild and incredible art from just their movements, just their being who they are, captured in trails of light.

In an age of impending digital take-overs, it is refreshing and re-affirming to see people use their full body movements (when able) in service to their exploratory nature and imagination… and be so engaged in the creative process that they don’t want to stop!

From suit-and-tie corporate professionals insisting they can’t draw to save their lives, to one particularly exuberant 5-year-old-ish girl who literally threw a foot-stomping tantrum when her parents insisted it was time to stop playing Light Painting and move on. The foot-stomping continued even after she was incentivized with the promise of ice cream. Does it even get better than this?