№ 00

Alicja
Orlovsky.

The painter behind every Flying Frog cover. She listens to a coffee's story and answers it with colour.

Chapter — Life

A late start,
on purpose.

Alicja was born in Ukraine to a Polish family and grew up in what was then Czechoslovakia — a childhood spent between languages, borders and the small, careful acts of a family remaking itself in a new country.

She wanted to paint from the beginning. She was told, quietly and often, that it was not a life. She listened. She built a career instead, raised a family, kept the brushes in a drawer.

She returned to painting after she retired — not as a hobby, but as the work she had always meant to do. In the years since, her practice has become full-time, exhibited and collected. She now lives and works between Sofia and Amsterdam.

Her paintings are unabashedly optimistic. They are made in the belief that a picture can carry a little of the world's brightness back to the person looking at it.

Chapter — Practice

How the covers
get made.

Listening first: Every commission begins with the story — a place, a person, a coffee. She reads it, sits with it, and only then picks up the brush.
Colour as answer: Her palette is warm and unafraid. Orange, ochre, olive and copper recur — the colours of the countries she has lived in.
Figures and frogs: Small characters appear across the work — sometimes a woman, sometimes a moon, often a frog. They carry the story from one painting to the next.
Optimism as method: She calls her practice a study in optimism. The paintings are not naïve; they are chosen — small arguments for looking up.