"UNTITLED" Painting

Lina Vaitiekunaite is a graduate of the Vilnius Academy of Arts and lives in Vilnius. She creates works on medium or large-format canvases, and occasionally on paper. A recurring motif in Lina's paintings is the sun or the circle. The painter says she didn’t consciously seek out symbols for her work—they simply “came” into the paintings. “I sat down to draw, with faces and masks swirling in my mind, but what appeared was the sun. Then another one, and another,” the artist recalls.

To her, the sun represents change, life, a never-ending cycle of rising and falling, rebirth. Lina’s works absorb and reflect what is happening in her life at the time—books she’s reading, love stories, even elements from her children’s drawings. It seems the suns appeared for a reason—though she dreamed of becoming an artist since childhood, she only fully committed to it after major changes in her personal life.

“I want people to lose themselves in thought while looking at my work—for the painting to become a moment to pause and reflect, to be alone with one’s thoughts, to observe the details, to sink deeper and deeper. I don’t like explaining my work; I’m much more interested in hearing what viewers think,” the artist says.