The Face as a Map of Inner Cycles
When I paint a face, I’m not painting identity in the traditional sense. I’m painting a threshold. The face becomes a symbolic surface where past experience, subconscious patterning, and emotional memory converge. In my work, the face is a karmic landscape: it holds old echoes, future impulses, and the unspoken dialogue between who we were and who we are becoming. This is why I return to altered, dreamlike, or botanical faces—they allow me to reveal truths that realism would hide.
Eyes as Portals of Karmic Recognition
Eyes are the most direct way into this landscape. I often paint eyes that glow from within, as if lit by an invisible ember. Others reflect like mirrors, returning the viewer’s gaze with uncanny clarity. Some take botanical form—petals opening as pupils, seeds glowing like inner lanterns, roots curling around the eyelid. These eyes act as portals. They recognise, they reveal, they remember. In many folk traditions, the eye was the seat of fate-reading, intuitive knowing, and soul-mirroring. I paint them in that lineage. They hold karmic truth without speaking it.
The Mirrored Eye and the Return of Self
A mirrored eye is not meant to make the viewer uncomfortable. It is meant to return something. When I paint an eye as a reflective surface, it becomes a symbolic tool for karmic recognition—the moment when a person sees the pattern they are repeating, or the emotion they have long avoided. The mirror is soft, not confrontational. It allows the viewer to approach themselves gently, with curiosity instead of fear. It is the kind of truth that arrives through reflection, not force.
Botanical Eyes and the Growth of Inner Vision
Botanical eyes carry their own meaning. A flower-shaped pupil suggests perception that blooms. A seed-shaped iris suggests a knowing still in its early stages. Roots woven into the eyelid speak of intuition connected to ancestral memory. These forms come from Slavic and Baltic folklore, where plants were believed to “see” invisible forces—weather shifts, intentions, spirits, emotional states. When I paint botanical eyes, I’m creating guardians of perception, symbols of intuition that grows quietly beneath the surface.
Masks as Emotional Filters
Masks in my art are not barriers. They are filters. They show which part of the self is ready to be seen and which part still lives in the shadow. A mask can soften the sharpness of vulnerability or accentuate a part of the face that holds unresolved tension. In tarot logic and folkloric ritual, masks were used to reveal the soul, not hide it. I use them in the same way: as thresholds between emotional layers, as tools for navigating karmic transformation.
The Glow Within the Face
One of the motifs I return to again and again is the glow that rises from beneath the skin. Sometimes it gathers in the cheeks, sometimes in the eyes, sometimes in the forehead or jawline. This inner illumination is symbolic of the moment when inner truth begins to surface. It is karmic light—the quiet reward of introspection. It is not harsh or overwhelming; it is soft, diffused, atmospheric. The glow says: something has shifted.
Emotional Self-Truth as Atmosphere
Surreal faces allow emotion to become atmosphere. Instead of expressing feelings through literal expression, I build them through texture, colour, and symbolic geometry. A face dipped in dusk colours carries longing. A face lit from within carries hope. A face with mirrored eyes carries recognition. These are not “portraits”; they are emotional states made visible. They allow the viewer to identify with the artwork without it belonging to any single identity.
Karmic Duality in the Surreal Face
Every face I paint is suspended between two poles: shadow and illumination, concealment and revelation, past pattern and future possibility. This duality is karmic. It reflects the constant oscillation between who we have been shaped to be and who we are capable of becoming. When the eyes glow or mirror, when the mask softens, when the botanical form opens, the face becomes a symbolic hinge between old cycles and new ones.
Why the Karmic Face Defines My Practice
I keep returning to faces because they allow me to explore transformation in its most intimate form. A face is familiar, but in surreal art it becomes a vessel—an altar of emotional truth, a site of karmic recognition, a field where light and darkness negotiate. My glowing eyes, mirrored eyes, and botanical eyes are simply variations of one idea: that the self is constantly revealing itself, layer by layer, through the quiet radiance of its own becoming.
