The Loneliness of a Hotel Room. (Limited Edition) Print

I believe that art is something which happens over time. Not the time it takes to create a painting, or the time it takes to conceive of and construct a sculpture, but the time it takes for the images, the impressions, the emotions, the fears the joys the pain - the list is long - to encode themselves in the subconscious, and then, later, in my case a lot later, to emerge as pieces of art. Sometimes more successful than others. Sometimes more satisfying than others, Sometimes joyful and sometimes not. Louise Cohen's text tells, in more details, the circumstances which led me to, finally, paint and sculpt. It took me some years before I took myself seriously as an artist, before I bought the finer brushes, the better quality paints the better canvas. I draw from life and the way I experience it for my art. One of the most powerful experiences that life has given me, has been that of motherhood. There have been, of course, many others, which inform my work. And then, there is the present. I observe the events around me. I take long walks in London and in our beautiful parks, I see the increasingly crowded streets and underground, the busy mobile phone users in the street. I am aware of the violence, the aggression. I practice Internal Chinese Martial Arts and I meditate. It all fits in the patchwork of life, and of what I try to express in my art. I love my work. In my book, Thracian Princess I tell of life as it was lived, in Eastern Europe during the war, with the terrors of both the Nazi and the Communist regimes, of emigration, of fear and of failure and of hope.