souria tm @souriatm - Tumblr Blog

souria سوريا, painter,

a visual diary, a still life (all photos are mine)

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read the PAINter letter, my dispatch from the studio

"The thing you were good at without being taught how, do that." That’s what I’d tell my five-year-old self, and probably anyone else still looking for a path.

The story for me goes like this: After high school I went on to study media and journalism because it was supposedly safer. I genuinely loved writing, delighted myself in juggling with words and asking countless questions, often driving everyone around me slightly mad. Years later, not much has changed; I'm still endlessly curious and asking a ton of questions^^. Meanwhile I was always drawing and imagining paintings in my head, but somehow I thought the two things belonged to different worlds. Writing was writing. Painting was painting. Years later, after working as a digital illustrator for some time, I traded the machine for the easel and, despite everything, finally became a painter. So the PAINter Letter is where I get to bring those two parts of myself together: writing about my painting.

These letters are a dispatch from the studio: they carry works in progress, sketches, fragments of paintings still uncertain of themselves, just as I am. What I’ve seen and read lately that made me giddy to create. They also contain the life and PAIN that surrounds the work. I’ve been stuck for a long time trying to make the right thing the right way. To be completely honest, I probably still am as I’ve used more gesso than actual paint over the past year. This is the painful process.

Sharing all of that, I can’t help feeling that within the cacophony of social media, self-promotion has more or less superseded the creative act itself. I wanted to find a format that felt truthful to both my practice and my personality. My writing's a bit rusty and the letters are a bit blunt, they're just personal letters written as I go, to a dear unknown reader. Maybe you?

thepainterletter.substack.com or follow me on substack here :)

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