I was diagnosed with stomach cancer (GIST) in 2007 during the nine years my husband and I were living in England. I have been on daily chemo therapy ever since. In 2015, the stomach tumour was successfully removed, but I had to restart chemo treatment a year later after a diagnosis of metastases in my liver.

At the start of my cancer journey, it had been a decided effort to deal with the stormy, fearful and painful emotions by using my paints, colours and brushes, as I had done for many years previously. It was as if, in the onslaught of these dark “wastes beyond wastes below” me, the creativity supported me while I just “could not, would not [let] go” of life!  It started as some kind of an inner journey within my larger life journey, which I later realised has actually became my ONLY life journey. Initially, I waded through many shades of deathly grey colours, but eventually found myself exploding back into former bursts of colour.

Now that I again find myself in my daily struggle, I prefer to think about both the dark shadows and bright light on my canvasses as representing the inevitable paradoxes in my own as well as in everyone else’s life in general.

For me, my own Art (like Life itself) resembles a mirror, in which various complex experiences of my inner self is reflected. At times my experiences are reflected through the images of a landscape, seascape or through still lives with people or flowers.

I personally find great freedom in the ability to “language” what I feel or sense inside myself through using my paint brushes and colours; whether this language contains elements of crying, struggling, conversing, rejoicing, amazement or just simple story-telling.

Sometimes, not often, I find that the viewer interprets my symbolic language closely in in line with my own “dialect.” Fortunately, however, the observer more often than not mirrors his very own varied experiences in my art, to my great delight.

The Night is Darkening Round Me

The night is darkening round me,

The wild winds coldly blow,

But a tyrant spell has bound me,

And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow,

The storm is fast descending,

 And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below,

But nothing drear can move me:

I will not, cannot go.

~ Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848)