Introducing myself

Hello Steemits!
I first heard about Steemit last year when two of my artist friends were just getting into it and they spoke so much about it and how interesting this platform is.
I´m quite reluctant to spending more time on my computer, but now, I finally decided to get involved as I found myself reading other people´s posts and enjoying the content.

I guess I´m known to be a painter and that is what I physically spend most of my time doing but I never decided as such to “be a painter”.
I currently live in the small island of Ibiza, Spain, where I was brought up. I have a studio here where I spend most of my time working in, but then love to spend a few months away in other countries where I´m able to concentrate more on deep work. I usually choose colder climates in our Summer time to get away from the busy tourism that invades us here.
I grew up in a very bohemian environment, surrounded by artists and people who chose Ibiza as a place to drop out of a programmed life elsewhere. This very cosmopolitan place also taught me to be quite self sufficient and know how to survive with very little.


I never wanted to be an artist as a way to make a living, so I had a job for many years that I loved (bush fire fighter), that enabled me to have time to paint, something I could not stop myself from doing. I´m self taught and just paint as necessity to discover the unknown to me. It´s a playful game.

Painting for me is a necessity to be able to maintain myself balanced between this world and my inner one. When I start a painting, I normally don´t know where it will take me. I start painting from the subconscious, letting shapes and colours find their space. No judgment. While I do this, I usually listen to music that helps my mind get further away from my inner chatter. It is like a kind of meditation. Thoughts come and go, I can see them coming and I try to not follow them and let them leave. Just observe.
There comes a moment in this process when I stop and look at the painting. I start to ask the painting questions that come to me. This is when I use my notebook and start writing automatically. Questions come to me like, Where do you come from? What are you here to tell me? What does this or that mean? What is the relationship between this or that? Words come to me, questions, sometimes many answers to the same question, etc… This turns naturally into my mind association one thing to the other and linking it all up into some kind of sense. From words to shapes to colours to things that are still not even in the picture and need to be. At this point I get a sense of what the painting gets to look like as an end result.

I still continue to work on this painting. Defining all the things that I found out in my conversation with the painting. This is when I get into painting patterns and textures, this can take forever, I seem to enter, again, a state of meditation, repeating once and again the same shapes. I find it a way to pull myself out of the process and let it happen.

A part from my painting I love the outdoors in nature. I love walking, running, reading, analysing, cooking, eating. I´m quite fond of what people call the “pleasures of life” ;-)
In this new platform of Steemit I hope to share a lot of the work I´m experimenting with now individually and also the work I do with Children.
I hope to have many wonderful and interesting encounters in Steemits!
Best Wishes and hope to talk more soon!
Romanie

www.romanie.net