Every painting begins with a feeling I can’t explain in words.
It might be a trace of melancholy, a moment of tenderness, or a dream that refuses to fade after waking. I never start with a full concept — only with an emotional vibration that I try to translate into something visual. Symbolism becomes my way of making sense of those sensations, and fantasy gives them shape.
I don’t think of my surreal or fantasy art as escapism. It’s not about inventing another world — it’s about seeing this one differently. Symbols allow me to take something internal, invisible, and deeply human, and express it through form, color, and rhythm. Each painting becomes a map of emotion, a visual language that sits somewhere between memory and imagination.
From Feeling to Image
When emotion arrives, it rarely comes with clarity. It’s raw, abstract, difficult to hold. That’s why I build images intuitively. I let gestures guide me — a flowing line, a sudden contrast of colors, the impulse to add metallic or reflective textures.
I often start with a symbolic element that carries emotional weight: an eye, a flower, a rope, a drop, a root. These motifs repeat through my original paintings and art prints, each time taking on new meaning. The eye might represent awareness one day, and fragility the next. The flower can stand for growth, but also for silence.
Working in mixed media allows me to layer emotions the same way we layer thoughts — slowly, imperfectly, allowing transparency and contradiction to coexist. In that process, color becomes emotion itself: deep violet for introspection, crimson for intensity, silver for quietness.
Symbolism as Emotional Architecture
I often think of painting as building an inner landscape.
Fantasy and surrealism let me organize chaos — to create worlds that feel emotional rather than logical. Symbolism gives me structure: it anchors these dreamlike scenes in something recognizable.
When I paint a surreal composition, I imagine that each element is part of a sentence, and together they form a visual poem. The symbols aren’t chosen intellectually; they arrive instinctively. But later, when I step back, I start to see patterns — recurring ideas about perception, connection, and vulnerability.
These symbols turn fantasy into something tangible. They let the viewer enter an imaginary world but still find traces of their own emotions there.
Translating Emotion into Form
In my process, emotions dictate materials.
When I need softness, I turn to watercolor — its flow mirrors surrender and calm. When I want tension and strength, I use acrylic or metallic paint, layering until the surface feels alive. For me, this is not just a technical choice but an emotional one.
Even when I later transform these images into art prints and posters, I keep their tactile quality intact — the visible brush texture, the imperfect line, the raw edge that reminds the viewer of the hand behind the image. A fantasy world built through symbolism must still feel human.
The Fantasy of the Inner World
People often associate fantasy with escape, but for me, it’s more like reflection. The surreal world of my paintings doesn’t exist to hide reality — it reveals the emotional truth beneath it. Each artwork becomes a symbolic record of an inner state: the moment when feeling turns into vision.
When someone hangs one of my symbolic wall art prints, I hope it creates a small shift in atmosphere — a reminder that emotions themselves can be landscapes, that imagination is not detachment but connection.
To create fantasy through symbolism is to turn emotion into architecture — to make the invisible visible. It’s an act of translation, of care, of faith in what can’t be said but can still be seen.
