my vision
“Without sadness, we wouldn’t feel happiness…”
It all started when…
I started drawing as a little girl. My sketchbooks were filled with portraits of girls. Mostly imaginary characters of all kinds of girls: punkrock, skate, hippie, and every day girls with different hairstyles, hats, and clothing. In my teenage years I started drawing more realistic portraits of people I knew, and I also became fascinated by drawing nudes. My mom at the time made sculptures of nudes, and so I suppose I kinda followed in her footsteps naturally.
When I met my husband at 18 years old, I became more independent and started creating rebellious girls in difficult scenarios in life. Girls smoking sigarettes, pregnant, or lonely. I was drawn to the sadness, and created big sad eyes and expressions on their faces. I was never really sad myself but something about sadness has always attracted me.
The following years I went to Art School for Graphic Design, graduated, worked a job, hated it, and then we had our first baby. I became a stay-at-home-mom and slowly went back to the drawing table, only occasionally, but it is when I started developing my sad paintings.
It is my passion to create intriguing, emotional portraits of sad women. It is hard for me to paint happy women because I’m not able to create the same deep expression and the message that I want to convey. My sad women are a part of my soul, my world, my life… and I couldn't live without creating them.
Why I love sadness…
Sadness is a part of life. So is depression, grief, pain… all the things that are uncomfortable to us. Life can’t always be amazing and happy and perfect. And if it was, we wouldn't know the highs and lows. We would get used to happiness and therefore not know what happiness is anymore. All the negative feelings we experience in life are necessary to experience all the positive feelings.
I feel we are expected to always be happy, pretty, healthy, in shape, have our shit together: a nice car, a beautiful home, a perfect marriage, a few kids… SO MUCH is expected of us to BE. And the reality is often very different. Our lives aren’t perfect. We’re not always happy. We can’t be, and we shouldn’t be. We focus so much on what we don’t have, instead of being appreciative of all the things we do have. And happiness…. well, it’s not found in things or others. It’s found deep within ourselves.
Life is about learning, making mistakes, growing, achieving goals, chasing dreams… and enjoying the process as we do so. The only way to find happiness is to embrace all of the not so happy parts of life. The hardship, the pain, the suffering. Accept them for what they are because it will always be there. No life is easy, some are harder than others, but we all experience hardship on some level.
My paintings are just a message to everyone out there that sadness and pain are a part of life and we shouldn’t hide it, be embarrassed by it, or think it’s wrong. Sadness is a beautiful emotion that we all need to accept and learn to embrace.. because only then, we can experience true happiness within.