When a painting happened too fast, I used to question myself. Did I work hard enough on it? Wasn’t I supposed to struggle through it, to resolve it in order to achieve that well-balanced outcome? So, I would keep going and often find myself in front of a ruined painting.

The last four years taught me differently. It felt like an art school showing up in my studio daily and doing the work - experimenting and playing with different media, celebrating occasional successes, but mostly accepting failures at the end of the day, and still going back to the studio the next. This experience of daily trials and errors taught me resilience. It taught me patience. It also gave me confidence in the work I created as my skills grew stronger.

What is most remarkable about these paintings is the fact that I painted them with complete freedom and lack of reservation. It was purely intuitive without any preliminary sketches or preconceived intentions. I was free. I had fun. It felt easy.

Easiness, I realized, is of course a result of four years of daily painting sessions. They say it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery. I’m slowly carving my way towards it.

Freedom and fun, however, I learnt from watching my kids draw on a daily basis for the last seven years. This long term consistency and dedication to the practice is the reason their work stands out and gets recognized by their teachers and peers.

These three 'Atmospheric' paintings were among the first ones I exhibited publicly in the US. Seeing how the viewers gravitated towards them was pure magic, especially when I knew how this magic came to fruition - with patience, freedom, confidence, and resilience. And yes, joy!

Atmospheric II

My most recent 'atmospheric' paintings are manifestations of that confidence. Painted on the reverse side of primed canvas which was new in itself (I usually paint on raw cotton canvas), I experimented with all kinds of paints and inks: fluid acrylic paint, acrylic ink, alcohol ink, diluted flashe paint and heavy body acrylic.

These paintings also felt like watercolor drawings due to the pools of watered down paints, incidental marks achieved by drawing lines using little tubes of inks, and the gestural strokes typical to my style of painting.

Atmospheric I

Atmospheric III