For many, being an artist is imagined as living in a state of eternal festivity - a fountain of imagination gushing in the middle of the room, surrounded by dancing muses.
It isn’t like that. Being an artist means being a monk. A life fully devoted to art, a life where you renounce everything in order to serve beauty.
There are days when that devotion is pure joy, and nothing else is needed. And there are bad days. Days when you feel like a tree torn from the soil, severed from its roots. Days when you are just a fragment of something larger, unable to remember what you once belonged to. Days when you are like a letter in a forgotten language, carrying vital knowledge but unreadable to anyone alive. Days when solitude feels less like serenity and more like a wound that will never heal.
Today is one of those days. Emptiness. Brokenness. A sense of being cut off - from the world, and from myself. And what do I do on such a day? Of course, I paint… Because the artist’s life is the monk’s life: serving beauty through good days and bad, because that is what I was born to do.
(Digital drawing, 2025)