For decades, John Czwartacki made a career out of words.
He had worked and lived in D.C. since the ’90s, but in 2020, multiple sclerosis forced him into early retirement. The chronic disease, which affects the central nervous system, has been part of his life since his diagnosis in 1993. As it progressed, it affected his voice, making it increasingly difficult for him to communicate the way he once had.
“By 2020, I got to do so many things, so many great things. I traveled. I got jobs,” Czwartacki, better known as CZ, told The Washington Sun. “Unfortunately, I had the real reality of like, okay, well, I can’t work in government. I can’t work in a social office. Doctors are not really happy with me doing that.”
A longtime Republican communicator, Czwartacki served as press secretary for then-Rep. John Boehner and later as communications director for the Office of Management and Budget during President Donald Trump’s first term. His job was to shape messages, write speeches and explain the work of government.
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For years following his retirement, Czwartacki struggled with what he described as a pent-up feeling, searching for a way to express an experience that spoken words could no longer fully capture.
Then, in November 2025, he bought a paintbrush and starter paints.
“Why is that? I’m not entirely sure,” he said. “I created pieces of art that I didn’t expect to create, right? I didn’t see that going in.”
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As multiple sclerosis changed his relationship with his body and senses, painting opened up a new way to experience and interpret the world.
“I feel like a whole new set of senses was opened up to me. So it’s like, wow!” he said. “A whole new suite of tactics to articulate myself are now available.”
For someone who had spent his career communicating through language, the discovery was revelatory.
“They’re not things like words but you feel them and what is going on here is so cool as someone who has loved to communicate his whole life,” he said. “I’m like it’s a whole new way to do it and I’m like, this is astounding to me.”
Czwartacki began experimenting with vibrant colors, fascinated by how they interacted on the canvas.
“Putting them close to each other and they would sing to each other and talk and leave you with a feeling of anticipation,” he said.
Less than a year after picking up a paintbrush, Czwartacki held his first art show on Oct. 8. The displayed paintings offered glimpses into the physical and emotional realities of living with a disease that has altered how he moves through the world — and how he sees himself.
The show was held in partnership with Survivors for Solutions, the nonprofit Czwartacki founded in 2022 to advocate for people facing health challenges who often struggle to make their voices heard in Washington.
Czwartacki painted “Hold On” while experiencing vertigo. Against a black background, white paint smears across the canvas, while a bright orange circle sits in the upper right corner.
The result is disorienting, an attempt to translate a physical sensation into something viewers can experience for themselves.
Another painting is an abstract self-portrait, a piece Czwartacki initially dreaded making.
He worried about his ability to draw recognizable features — “a nose or an ear or an eye” — but his son asked him to try.
The skeletal outline is fractured, he said, while the green near the bottom represents grounding. The background uses the same orange found in “Hold On,” a color that stands out against the more subdued elements of the portrait.
“I saw myself as incomplete and broken — still telling the story with things like this and also the MS,” he said. “And then the orange is kind of like shouting at you — it’s paradoxical.”
The work does not attempt to neatly resolve the contradictions of his experience. Instead, the paintings hold them together: brokenness and expression, frustration and discovery, the limitations imposed by illness and the possibilities that remain.
Tina Robinson has known Czwartacki for over five years and founded an MS support group with him. She said he and his art are “proof that MS doesn’t get the final word.”
“As a patient myself, it’s inspiring to see him use the gift of time that new treatments have given us to find a new voice through his art,” Robinson said. “I hope his story inspires others living with chronic illness like MS or any challenging disease to take on new challenges and hold on to hope.”
Czwartacki may no longer be shaping political messages from inside the government, but he has not abandoned the impulse that drove him to the profession in the first place. He is still telling stories. He is still trying to make people feel something. He has simply found a different medium.
“I felt very proud of myself for my skill with English and my ability to write things and speeches and op-eds,” he said. “But when I learned to paint like this, I felt like I was taught every language in the world.”
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