Paintings from the Deep Unknown. Part I

How paintings feel when they come to me

What are they, and how they came to be? + Why Apples Are Falling

This is Part I of the series about the collection of images that started appearing in my meditations in 2021. I call them The Paintings from the Deep Unknown. After painting dozens of them, I decided to recreate the timeline of events that led to those magical experiences.

I cannot count exactly how many times I tried to write this down - I wrote it in my journal, in the back of a planner, on random scraps of paper, in my mind during long subway rides, or right before falling asleep. This story feels like a maze with no beginning and no end, like an intricate puzzle of so many pieces that there's no table big enough to fit them all. As I write this, I have all those scribbles, bits, and pieces carefully laid down before me. They look intimidating but are ready to talk - fragments of my journey, twisted, scattered from page to page with uneven handwriting in dark blue ink (my favorite) being something that unites them all, visually making them belong to one author - me.

And here I am, facing them in a white painter's suit as if it were my armor. Smiling gently with the corners of my mouth, I’m typing word by word, occasionally taking my eyes from the screen to glance around the studio. There is a slight hesitation hiding deep inside, somewhere in the area behind my rib cage. The insecurities of a freshly minted writer are sitting on the opposite side of my desk, not even bothering to stay quiet; my English isn't as good as I want it to be to express myself fully, and my inner critic is going on rounds, and rounds of prickly arguments on why I should stop typing immediately. But somewhere beyond that, there is an inner knowing that I must start telling this story, sharing how it feels to go deep and beyond into the Unknown, into Self. I am writing this to document the beautiful journey that changed my life. I am also writing this for anyone who might be standing at the threshold of discovering their own journey. This knowing is more potent than any perfectionism or inner criticism I can ever accumulate, and I'm following its lead.

So, let's dive in.

My love for documenting translates into keeping journals and diaries of all sorts. Like time machines, they allow me to travel back in time and read what I thought, felt, and went through weeks, months, or even years ago.

I'm quite blatant with my diary; I don't sugarcoat, I don't write imagining that someone will read it one day, and I don't try to be nice. It's a pure, sporadic, and raw stream of consciousness. And I like it this way. My diary is where I show up as I am, as an unedited version of me, and just be, similar to how I am when I paint.

I decided to play a detective and recreate the chronology of events that led to how those magical paintings came to be.

January 2021

Are you familiar with the word of the year? It's when you choose a word for the upcoming year, like abundance, trust, etc. I tried doing that multiple times but never succeeded. The word I’d chosen would dissolve in the chaotic flow of days, eventually making it disappear from my memory by the end of the month. But January 2021 felt different. One crisp morning, realization hit me like a Newton’s apple - I realized that no one hurt, criticized, or pressured me as much as I did myself. An overwhelming feeling of gravity from a recent discovery suddenly pressed me to the ground.

Am I good enough? Do I need to work hard to deserve to be loved? Why do the opinions of others often dictate the way I feel about myself? Those and many other questions started popping into my head, like popcorn on a hot skillet. I felt so bored of living like that. It was utterly irritating. I craved change but didn’t know where to start, and I didn't want to wait another year, two, or five for it to happen.

Pages from my visual diaries

I wrote in my diary:

"I want to explore, truly digging into all of it. Even if it'll be hard or painful. I'm not afraid.

I want to learn how to love this weirdly beautiful human being with whom I've lived for the past 34 years - me."

I choose ‘self-love,’ something I have always been struggling with, as my word of the year, promising to go on a journey of learning how to love and accept my true nature, not trying to fight or resist it, not attempting to be someone I am not. When I started settling into this intention, a vision came - a wall full of self-portraits - big and small, done in various mediums, raw, nudes, owl-portraits, abstractions…

Some of the self-portraits I did early in 2021

This desire to explore led to a series of self-portraits. Each portrait was a mirror to different parts of me - into my relationships with my physical body, into an almost lifelong battle with migraines, uncovering the way I mask my true self to fit in, and more.

I wasn’t doing them to learn how to paint myself realistically, even though I’m sure that practice would improve my skills. After painting so many versions of myself, I hoped I might finally come closer to genuinely loving this weird and beautiful creature I see in a mirror every morning. That was when I painted my first 'ugly' self-portrait. The intention was to embrace all of it - beauty and terror, dark and light, ugly and pretty, to give each side a fair highlight and a place to shine.

Painting helps me reflect on a subject on a totally different level than writing, talking, or thinking. I think better when I paint. I write with the colors I choose. I do my talking with the symbols I adapted as my visual language. So, I used it to start processing, to lift layer by layer, allowing things to surface slowly, just a play with a hint of intention. And that's what I began doing - showing up at my easel ready to see…

You cannot deny yourself. You ask, am I painting myself? I’d be a swindler if I did otherwise. I’d be denying my existence as an artist. I’ve also been asked, what do you want to convey? And I say, nothing but my own nature.

How can I paint anything else?

- Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art

February 2021

I got a call from R. He is the type of friend whom I consider my chosen family. We've known each other for years. He spends more time traveling than staying in one place. But he's the one I can call any time of the day or night, being sure that on the other side of the line, I'll meet a warm heart hug. He is my gift. We shared some news and life updates, and then, randomly, he said - you must do this online meditation retreat! It's going to change your life! The next one is in March, and you must apply.

It was the middle of winter - ongoing pandemic, lockdowns, face masks, and paranoia floating everywhere. I thought for a second - it's going to change my life? Yes, please! Give me two! I filled out a registration form and started counting the days.

It looked like that retreat was quite popular because I didn't make it into the March session because they ran out of places. They put me on a waiting list for May.

It would be an understatement to say I got curious about it - I was dying to know what they do at that retreat and why it was so hard to get in. Plus, it's completely free. They only asked for a gift of at least three and a half hours of my time per day. Plus, you couldn't just get in. You needed to be invited by someone who has participated before. So mysterious!

Self-portrait with the birds of paradise, oil on cotton, 2021

April 2021

I got sick with COVID. I lived without smelling or tasting anything for a few weeks. It seemed like I got a light case, but I was drawing in anxiety - what if it only seemed light, but somewhere inside my body, something scary was happening that I was not aware of?

Completely losing access to two of my senses made me realize that I took them for granted my whole life. I can't count how many times I burned something on the stove because I couldn't smell it burning. I was frantically taking multiple showers daily because of paranoia that I might smell bad without realizing it.

With the loss of taste and smell came indifference. I could lie in bed for hours staring at the ceiling or a wall, not having the mental energy or desire to do anything. I could feel the air entering my nostrils, but it didn't carry anything. It felt as if I was slowly drawing in a thick syrup of helplessness. I lost a taste for life. I sobbed multiple times. Food tasted like cardboard (not that I tried cardboard, but that's how I imagine it to taste).

Why am I retelling you my COVID story? Because it hides one of the puzzle pieces.

If you saw my meditation paintings, you might've asked yourself why she paints those shells. Or are those snails? Why do they appear in every single image? I wish I could give you a straightforward answer, saving you from reading many paragraphs in my broken English. But there's none. There's a story full of twists and turns that I'm unfolding with you as I’m writing. Like a detective, I traced my art's shell/spiral motif. The search brought me to a self-portrait I painted while sick with COVID.

After spending a day or two in bed with anxiety, I forcefully put myself in front of an easel. I decided to paint even if there was zero motivation in my body. Somehow, I showed up daily. It felt like I'd recover and regain my senses as soon as I finished that painting.

The process of working on 'Believe in Your Dreams', oil on linen, 2021

Working on that piece felt like I was acting in a slow-motion movie, playing a snail part, a six-foot-tall kind of snail. No sketches, straight onto the canvas, self-portrait started peaking through, and there was a shell. I remember painting that shell and feeling as if someone was guiding my hand. It came from nowhere, didn't make any sense, and simultaneously made all sense in the world. Considering my mental state and the virus raging through my body and nervous system, I didn't pay much attention to that. I just painted what was arising without questioning.

I kept on showing up and finished the piece in about ten days. It was done just in time when I started tasting the food and smelling the world around me.

That self-portrait was the first painting sold during that month's shop update.

To be continued…

P.S. If you’d like to know what happens next, subscribe to From the Shell of My Heart publication I started on Substack.

It can be delivered to your inbox as a newsletter or read in the Substack app.

I want From the Shell of My Heart to be a safe space for my inner child to express herself in her not-yet-perfect English, for the thoughts that want to live through words and paintings, a place for everything happening all at once with no plan kind of plan, except being unapologetically me.

I’ll be sharing behind the scenes of my studio practice, my day-to-day life, and things my heart finds interesting to shed light on. The intention behind this big/little personal project is to gift me with a gift of expression through writing that I lost somewhere along the way while adulting. 

I’d love this to become a safe space for you, too, and inspire you to dive deeper into figuring out what makes your inner child thrilled.

Love, Eve