100 Notes To Myself: Episode 1, Start
For years, I was chasing the idea of becoming a successful artist.
I built a successful international art career. I exhibited around the world, participated in residencies and museum shows, and constantly pushed myself forward. At some point, I went too far. I wanted recognition and without fully realising it, I had become a mirror of what the art world expected me to be. I didn't realise that the success of my paintings had become a measure of who I was.
One day, after another international art award, a deep question arrived, why was I still unhappy, despite everything I had achieved through years of hard work?
The feeling I had spent years running from suddenly became impossible to ignore. That evening, for the first time, I decided to stop running.
Wait – that's not the art that makes me happy.
I didn't know what to do with that feeling, so I took a pause. Later, I returned to the one thing I had always known how to do: create. But this time, I wasn't painting to prove anything. I simply told myself: forget about everything and draw.
And for the first time, art became a way of paying attention to what I was actually feeling.
At the end of 2025, I found so much freedom in painting that I decided to give myself a whole next year to follow where it would take me.
2026.01
That became 100 Notes to Myself - 100 paintings that I will create over the course of one year, each one born from a thought, a feeling, a wish, or something I wanted to remember. I knew it would be a long and demanding journey. But I wanted to give myself the freedom to create without rushing towards an outcome, without trying to prove anything, and without knowing exactly where I would end up.
At first, the idea of creating 100 paintings felt almost impossible. I knew I could never create a collection of this scale by relying on inspiration alone. So I turned the project into a regular practice. I kept showing up, painting, and moving forward even on the days when inspiration wasn’t there. The routine gave me something that inspiration could not – a way to keep going when I might otherwise have stopped.
And slowly, the project began to change my professional life as well. My blog grew several times over, and I started receiving so many warm messages, people saying that I inspired them – and that gave me the fuel to keep going.
2026.08
I am still in the middle of this journey. But I realised that people were responding not only to the paintings themselves, but also to the honesty behind them.
Looking back, during the pause that led me here, I began going to the sea every day. I would sit there for hours, watching the water, the changing sky and the smallest details around me. I started writing down whatever came to me, a thought, a desire, a realisation, sometimes even a personal manifesto.
These were deeply personal notes, never meant for anyone else. For 100 Notes to Myself, I decided to turn them into paintings and share them openly. And I think that honesty is what allows people to connect with them — to recognise their own thoughts, feelings and desires in words and images that were once only mine.
And this process began to change me, too…
