Research in painting emotions
Over the past few years, I have created a series of paintings that explore the emotional experience of my body. Working with and using primarily acrylic on canvas as base. I approach each painting intuitively—letting color, form, and movement guide the process. My visual language moves between abstraction and figuration: bodies, faces, and gestures appear, but are often distorted, merged, or unravelled. This fragmentation is not meant to hide, but to expose something internal—something less visible but something that I deeply feel.
Throughout these works, I use an expressive, often contrasting color palette. Warm tones: reds, pinks, ochres—interact with cooler blue tones to evoke intimacy, tension, and vulnerability in my first painting. My brushwork is physical and layered, building up the image as a reflection of emotional depth and complexity of an emotion I feel.
This body of work is part of an ongoing investigation: how can an image convey emotion in its rawest form? I experiment with composition, fragmentation, and the intensity of color to understand what gives a painting its emotional charge. The paintings reflect a personal journey—through themes of connection, bodily memory, estrangement, and the shifting of boundaries of my identity.
Each piece stands on its own, but together they form a visual archive of how I have grown, questioned, and redefined the way emotion lives in paint. My inspiration for color use comes primarily from How Francis Bacon uses colors in his paintings.
Dad, Painting: You and I
In the two paintings below I tried to depict the feeling of intimacy and the emotion of longing. By painting two human-like figures I wanted the viewer to feel the intimacy between the two figures. For conveying this emotion I used sharp lines and bright colors. The more bright the color is, the more intense the emotion is. The first image ( see painting in blue tones below)is about longing between two people. Because in this painting where purple and blue collide, for me blue and purple stand for sadness. Because at the time I didn't have a good relationship with my father. So that makes the combination of purple and blue sad for me. The way in which I symbolize color is very personal and hard to explain. Blue doesn’t always mean sadness to me but it can differ in meaning when combined with an other color.
The second (see painting with red pink tones below) has more of an idea of longing for one’s self. I tried to portray this by drawing the human figure looking up ( second image below). In the second painting I used primarily warm tones as background, but I put a cold tone in the skin of the two figures. I scraped the cold layer halfway of the figures because I wanted the viewer to take a closer look at the figures. I also painted a bit in scribbled lines throughout the whole painting to give the painting more intensity in composition.