A painting that strongly influenced me at a young age is a work by Wojciech Weiss called Saddened (1898). After researching Weiss and other Polish artists of his time, I dove into my roots and began to understand why I value my Polish identity as a drive to be an artist. Before Poland’s independence, Polish nationalism was celebrated through Expressionist paintings, as Polish artists tried to identify as a nation.These paintings of the nineteenth century reminded me of Summers when I would visit Poland and spend time with my grandmother. Weiss inspired me to hand knit a painting. I drew studies of his work, then pixelated them on a computer, and knitted every pixel to recreate Saddened into a textile. Polish artists in Post Independent Poland, under rule of the Soviet Union, could not paint what inspired them; researching Polish history in painting made me appreciate painting as a privilege.