This Is How I Paint the World

Beauty doesn't exclude shadow.

A lot of people tell me my paintings are bright, colourful, sometimes almost fairy-tale-like. And it's true — colour is there. Intense, layered, sometimes almost luminous.

But for me, colour was never a way of running from harder emotions.

In my work, beauty and shadow exist side by side. They don't fight each other. They don't try to cancel each other out. They simply coexist.

The figures I paint are often calm. They stand still, looking somewhere just past you, as if they were present and absent at the same time. There's no literal drama in them, no clear-cut story. And yet, underneath, there's a tension — subtle, unnamed.

I don't plan this as a formal device. I'm not constructing a contrast between light and dark.

It's more of a natural way of looking at reality.

Because the world isn't one-sided. Joy can exist alongside fear. Calm alongside alertness. Closeness alongside loneliness. These states don't cancel each other out — they often show up in the very same moment.

Colour is the first layer I build. Underneath it, I leave room for silence, tension, and things left unsaid.

Pure decoration doesn't interest me. Neither does literal drama.

What feels closest to me is the state of "in between" — the moment when beauty doesn't erase shadow, but lets it exist alongside it.

Maybe that's exactly why my paintings are never entirely light nor entirely dark. They're like emotions that are hard to name precisely.

Beauty doesn't exclude shadow. And I think it's exactly in that in-between space that I feel most like myself.