The moment it's just a distinct feeling you barely even know how to explain, if someone else would dare to ask you about it?
That's where I work.
Where I think, where I get inspired, and most importantly where I get creative.
It doesn't need to make sense. The language it speaks in is feeling. Maybe inspire, maybe challenge, maybe make ones deepest, hidden part seen.
I'm Lea Terletzki.
Figurative painter. Archetypal figuration with its core in mythology, psychology, social critique, the interplay of beauty and ugliness. Light and shadow held in the same frame without flinching.
When I finally finish a painting, it's not satisfaction or pride that I feel first. Not even the urge to immediately share it with the world.
I let it sit. Allow it to sink in, because what I feel first upon completion is exhaustion and release. Because each artwork carries a part of my soul. Things I carried for so long, until I brought them to paper or canvas for it to hold it for me now. Things and topics usually born from my own experiences, observations and the things that keep me awake at 4am. Haunting my thoughts until I either paint them, or write them down.
Sometimes those things are easy, and sometimes they are heavy. But always they are true, as much as personal experience can be true.
I'm telling you that, because it matters for what it is.
This is no classic studio diary. It isn't inspiration content or some aesthetic look-book. It's raw, it's honest and sometimes it bleeds.
It's the framework behind the work. The symbolic architecture, the psychological logic, the questions I'm actually asking and circling like a moth to a flame. It's hope, it's wonder, and sometimes it's Weltschmerz and ugly frustration with society. But in core it's the unfiltered mix of emotion.
My paintings make people want to write poems. They make people go quiet. Occasionally they make people uncomfortable in a way they can't, or don't want to, explain. They rather look away because they can't hold what it's unraveling.
I think that is because the figures already know and reveal something the viewer is still working out about themselves.
Or chose to bury for comfort.
That's what I'll be writing about here. The ideas underneath the images. Sharp enough to make some part in you slightly seen, possibly slightly accused.
Each at my time. No haste, no perfection, because the things beneath the surface don't want to be rushed. They want to breathe and bloom at their pace.
And need the space for it.
If that's not for you. No hard feelings.
If it is. Welcome. Pull up a chair.
Lea
Find my work: lea.terletzki
