"Wise owl" Painting

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 beginning. Painting on a surface I have made with my own hands changes the nature of the gesture.
My work is graphic and minimal. I am drawn to still life and landscape — not as documentation of the world, but as occasions for something quieter: an inquiry into solitude, into loss accepted, into the way absence can hold as much weight as presence. Nature is my constant reference, though what I seek in it is less botanical than philosophical. I am interested in what a handful of marks can bear, what a spare composition can hold without collapsing under its own silence.
I also write. I have authored a book and translated another — and I find that writing and painting are not separate disciplines for me, but two inflections of the same attention. Both require listening. Both live or die by what is left out.
I make work that hopes to arrive, quietly, at something true.