"Spring Smells I" Painting

The studio is where the noise stops. Before I enter, I am a mother of two daughters, a wife, a person carrying the weight of ordinary life — worries about the future, about family, about everything that waits outside the door. But somewhere between stretching the linen — I only use pure linen or heavy cotton, fabrics so alive you want to run your hand across them before a single brushstroke — and mixing the first colours, something shifts. The thoughts don't stop all at once. They slow. Then slow further. And by the time the palette knife reaches the canvas and the first petal takes shape, they are simply gone. I have been a student of Eckhart Tolle since 2017. His teaching didn't give me a philosophy. It gave me a practice. And that practice, I discovered, lives most naturally in paint. In 2019, I had the rare gift of attending his three-day retreat here in Germany. It was an experience that cannot be put into words. Each flower I build with the palette knife is not planned. It arrives. The colour was chosen earlier, yes — but the petal itself happens in the Now. There is no past in that gesture. No future. Only the resistance of linen, the weight of paint, and the delicate silence that follows when the thinking mind finally steps aside. This is what I paint. Not flowers. Not gardens. Not decoration for beautiful rooms — though I hope they bring beauty too. I paint the moment when a person comes back to themselves. If you feel something standing in front of one of these works — a kind of stillness, an exhale you didn't know you were holding — then you already understand what they are made of.