Petruta West

I grew up in Romania, in a home where art was not a pursuit but a presence. My father was a painter — his canvases, his exhibitions, the quiet intensity of his work — formed the first language I learned to read before words. That early immersion planted something in me that took decades to fully surface.
For over twelve years, I worked in publishing alongside three significant Romanian artists, an experience that deepened my understanding of image-making, visual language, and the relationship between art and the printed page. During that time I also created illustrations for children's books and educational materials — work that taught me the discipline of communicating through restraint, of saying much with little.
For the past nine years, I have lived in England — a displacement that has quietly shaped my eye. Distance has a way of clarifying what one carries and what one leaves behind. I find that living elsewhere has made my connection to interior worlds — to memory, to nature, to solitude — more deliberate, more necessary.
Today, I paint — primarily acrylics on canvas — and I work on handmade paper that I craft myself. This paper is not a material choice alone; it is a practice, a slowness, a way of beginning before the beginn...