My current naive childlike style is the voice of the inner child that I finally let speak. As a child, I was forbidden to speak out. There was no trust in the family and I forbade myself to open up. I was forbidden to draw. If I drew, I hid it, thinking that I could only draw realistically, so that no one would pick on me. Because I was afraid of what they'd say.
Once in primary school I drew something and the teacher said it was very fresh and interesting and I should develop it further. My parents were discussing it out loud. It scared me, and after that I never picked up a pencil again. At school, I used to order work from my classmates to avoid drawing myself. I said I didn't know how and I didn't want to, but it was really just fear. The child inside had shut down.
Many years later, at the age of 33, I allowed myself for the first time to paint the way I felt. No rules. Just colour, just emotion. I painted incessantly, as if to make up for years of silence. It was the first real contact with myself. I remember a sudden moment when I realised that for probably the first time in my life I was so happy that I wanted to go on living, to have time to paint something else, even though before that I didn't care how long I lived. Art became a way of healing.
Then I went into training. Courses, teachers, classes. According to my old attitudes, I decided that I was drawing ‘wrong, wrong’ again, and I wanted to learn to draw “beautifully”, ‘correctly’, as is customary in classical art. And when I learnt, it all disappeared. I stopped painting. For a few years. The living was gone. In place of freedom came the pressure of conformity.
After difficult events - personal, family, global - I turned to a spiritual quest. At first, individual works-installations like ‘Tree of Life’ and ‘Co-Creation’ began to emerge, and then a series about Cyprus emerged. Through purple colours, through collages, I conveyed the feeling of the island, its deep spirituality. The stories of the persecution of the monks, the hidden monasteries, the silence imbued with faith, amazed me. That's why this series is low-key, quiet. It's not about a child. It's about an inner search. But it was the trigger for allowing myself to create again.
Then there were installations about inner retrieval through a spiritual mirror. The exploration of the self through form, through colour, through inversion. One of these works, about the flora and fauna of Cyprus, had echoes of the Cyprus series in terms of the meaning of colour, but already allowed us to catch the real colours - green, white, the colours of nature, which are true - through inversion, through a mirror in which the tree of life was reflected. This is how the world was reflected to me, refracted through a sense of spirit.
The other big work is about the body. About pain. I decided to practice yoga and pilates to heal my inner state, and clamps and traumas started to come out through the body, because the body remembers everything. So this work was born, as an inner response to the pain coming out, as a moment of living it. The painting is all in red. It shows a body torn by emotions. If these emotions are not lived, they become black. The black rises from the depths and displaces all living things, consumes, deprives the soul of light. The inner world dies.
But if you turn the colours, invert them, transform them profoundly, and not just put on blue glasses, a transformation comes. Green appears - love, blue - clarity, violet - spirit. Gradually white displaces black. The world begins to glow internally. And the child returns. He manifests. Gently at first, through flashes of happiness. And then more freely.
My new works are bright, naive, free. I'm learning to hear myself again, to let myself feel. Through colour, through the body, through movement, travel, dance, meditation. All of this is intertwined in the canvases. I give myself back to myself.
I see people responding. Those who have been through pain get stuck on the heavy, emotional canvases. Those who are just looking for a way back to themselves may feel annoyed - especially at the bright, naive images. That's fair, too. Because the works resonate. They touch what's hidden. And they help you recognise where there is still pain inside and where there is already light.
For most of my life, I have been logical. The right education at the right university, a successful career, a highly sought-after profession in IT, a position in top management - all the trappings of a successful life, as it was accepted in society, as it was accepted by my parents. But there came a moment when I realised: it couldn't go on like this. I quit. Completely. Into art. To heal. To get my voice back. To feel alive again. To realise how deep the rabbit hole goes.