I started painting as a toddler. Finger paint on the dining room wall. First scribbles my mother kept. After school I wanted to study art — but without a network or access, I chose differently. For decades, art was something I did on the side. Never letting go of. Never taken seriously.

I have lived for a long time with the consequences of several brain surgeries: tinnitus, trigeminal neuropathy, balance disorders. My body draws boundaries my mind refuses to accept. I paint contrasts because I am contrast — energy and limitation, what you see and what you don’t.

Then came a turning point: divorce, physical collapse, a stay at a pain clinic. In art therapy I found a book about the artist VOKA — and painted his Warhol portrait. Not to copy it, but to feel how he paints. That painting changed something. Opened something.

My life itself is a web of contradictions: closeness and distance. At home in two languages, two countries, two identities. Four children pulled to three continents. The longing for connection and the reality of distance — that runs through my work, even when it isn’t explicitly visible.

What fascinates me: the energy that arises when two things collide that shouldn’t belong together — and yet are both true. That tension is my subject — in the motifs, in the technique, in the name.

My work comes from what I know: highs and lows, burden and joy, darkness and light. Contradictions that are both true at once. Flowing and static. Soft and hard. Organic and sharp. Colorful and white. I am both — colorfulweis.