It wasn’t until I got to know myself deeply, that my work started to flourish. The fact that I am an artist and have always been was not enough in the long run. I remember when I was not more than seven years old and started taking painting classes in an art & sports program of the public school in the capital of Brazil. We used to go to parks nearby to draw trees and leaves under a very warm sun and to reproduce Van Gogh’s artworks on big paper sheets. I remember very clearly how happy my mom was, seeing me finally showing some sort of talent in something. Well... talented or not I realised that with brushes and papers I have the power of making people feel something and it does not matter what feeling it is, when you connect with your emotions... you are closer to your true self. Something that I only understood later in my career.
I grew up in a very catholic family and it created an aversion to religion, to gods and worst… to spirituality. I spent almost my whole life feeling unworthy of love or success, I did not know myself.
While struggling in my spiritual journey and been overwhelmed trying to cope with a lot that was happening at the time I came to realise that I had the choice of staying in that place or making real changes in my life.
I reset.
I decided to dive into my pain and while there, I realised that the only way was through it. Healing traumas and limiting beliefs, recovering a sense of self-esteem and self-worth, doing all the shadow work I came to a realisation that I was a witch and the puzzle was solved. I had to open my mind to my long-gone sense of spirituality and connection with nature, I found out that what I was desperately seeking was within me the whole time.
It was only when I got to know myself and my way of seeing the world that I could understand and get connected to my studio practice. It was when everything started making sense, why I painted what I was painting, why during my graduation in visual arts I was researching for outsiders, women in vulnerable situations, seeking representational work of underdogs in the visual field. But my interest was not about representing the poverty or the pain, my goal was, and now more than ever IS, to help people to see through my oil paintings the possibility of change in their lives. Just like I have changed my own reality several times. Presenting a surreal and magical world to them. Inspired by mysticism, nature, and symbolism.
My practice consists of drawing on smooth gessoed wood panels and painting with very small brushes, planning many things beforehand but also allowing the paintings to show me what they want to. I feel that I am only a tool to make the vision in my head come to the physical world. I don’t feel that I make only art, I offer an experience to the viewer.
Art has this beautiful power of opening space for dialogue, possibilities of changing one’s way of seeing the world, it has survived thousands of years modifying its forms and the way it affects people. I am very grateful for being part of the contemporary art community telling visual tales and showing that even though this is a hard moment to be alive we can still see magic everywhere.
Website: www.lannaariel.com