Velvet Brushstrokes & Quiet Fire

They asked me once, “Why do you paint?”

Someone once asked me why I paint.

I remember smiling because I genuinely didn't know how to answer.

Some days I still don't.

I don't paint to explain myself.

If anything, painting lets me stop explaining for a while.

People often think I paint flowers.

I don't think I do.

I think I paint the feeling that arrives just before something blooms.

The quiet before relief.

The colour that appears before the words do.

Sometimes I paint because I'm carrying something I don't know what to do with.

Sometimes I paint because neon pink refuses to leave me alone.

Both reasons feel equally valid.

I draw petals over and over again.

Not because I'm trying to copy nature, but because repetition has always felt like a way of listening.

Some people pray with words but I seem to do it with paint.

I used to wonder why my flowers refused to stay quiet.

Why the petals kept arriving in neon pink, coral and orange when so much of me felt darker than that.

For a while I thought they belonged to two different people.

One who carried the ache.

Another who insisted on colour.

Now I wonder if they were always telling the same story.

Perhaps the colour isn't denying the darkness.

Perhaps it's answering it.

Not everything I make comes from sorrow because that would be exhausting.

Some paintings begin with laughter.

Some started with curiosity.

Some because I found a colour I couldn't stop thinking about.

Others begin with a question that follows me around for weeks.

I rarely know which one it's going to be.

People sometimes ask whether my work is joyful or melancholic.

I don't know.

I've never been very interested in choosing.

Life has never asked me to feel only one thing at a time.

So why should a painting?

Maybe that's why my petals never stay politely inside a white room.

They stretch. They spill. They insist on being seen.

Not because they're trying to escape the darkness, but because they've learned it can hold colour too.

I don't need my work to match someone's sofa.

I'd rather it quietly recognise something they've been carrying but haven't found the words for yet.

If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and feels a little less alone, then perhaps the painting has already done enough.

Maybe that's always been enough.

— Dura Ki Hana