He started painting around 1927 upon recommendation and persuasion of the above mentioned Hohmann, who clearly made crucial impact on the fate of such a gifted medium as Ociepka. That was when he created the elaborate morality painting Droga człowiecza (The Human Way). Initially, the artist had difficulties with painting: he did laborious work, usually spending several months on his first paintings, but in fact that is when his best compositions were created (Szachy/Chess, 1930)
However, following the criticism of his works which he received from Prof. Tadeusz Dobrowolski, who was impervious to his poetics, he quit painting for seventeen years; he did not return to his practice until 1947 (according to some reports, this actually took place before or during the Second World War).
After Ociepka returned from the war to Janów in 1946, together with Otto Klimczok, he founded an art collective, which in the 1950s became the hub of a group of amateur painters, unoficially referred to as Janowska Group (formal name: Circle of Non-professional Painters).
By that time, Ociepka was already very active artistically. A collection of works which created over a short period of time turned out to be sufficient to be presented at his first solo exhibition, which took place in 1848 in Warsaw. It did not resonate with the public, however. It wasn’t yet the time to explore Polish naïve painting. Nikifor’s fame and his precursory role, would come a little later.
But Ociepka was already determined. He continued to paint and moreover treated art as a divine mission. He was interested in representing major themes, which had been introduced by artists for ages, such as for instance the struggle between the Good and Evil. He also often returned to compositions related to Saturn and its imagined flora and fauna, thus making a reference to the ideology of the Rosicrucians. They constituted a coherent, outstanding group of personal works within his oeuvre – paintings directly inspired by occultism (the series Życie na Saturnie/Life on Saturn, Życie na miesiączku/Life on the Moon, both from 1954; the canvases painted under the influence of Lorber’s book – including Lew Saturna/The Lion from Saturn, Krówka Saturna/The Cow from Saturn).