What It Means to Paint What Can’t Be Said

Some things — I just can't put into words.
It’s not about being poetic. It’s about survival.
There’s stuff that builds up inside me — grief, anger, memory, pressure — and if I don’t paint it out, it stays. It festers. It burns a hole somewhere.

This is what I mean when I say I paint what can’t be said.

It’s not a tagline. It’s how I stay sane.

Sometimes it’s political.
Like, really political. A news headline that hits too hard. Someone jailed for telling the truth. Women’s rights crushed again. Watching people scroll past as if it’s nothing. That’s when I start throwing color without knowing where it’s going. That’s when I don’t wait for it to be pretty.

Other times, it’s smaller. Softer.
Like a voice message from a friend I hadn’t heard from in ages — and suddenly I’m crying in the kitchen. Or walking past someone on the street and something about their face, their energy, stops me. I don’t even know why. But it sits with me, and later it shows up in a shape or a line or a strange mix of blue and grey that I didn’t expect.

None of that fits into a sentence. But it fits into a painting.

That’s why I use old linen.
Antique textiles that already lived a life before me.
They feel like witnesses. Like they already know what I’m trying to say. Sometimes I think they say it better than I ever could.

Oil paint on that kind of surface… it doesn’t behave. It soaks in weird. It fights back.
Just like the stuff I’m trying to express. It’s messy. It resists.
It doesn’t want to be controlled — and honestly, neither do I.

Not every painting comes out clean. Some come out shaking.
Some come out so soft I almost miss them.
But they’re all true.

I don’t paint to decorate.
I paint because there are things I need to feel — and feeling them on canvas is the only way I can let them move through me.

So when people say,
“I don’t know why, but this one… I feel it,”
I know it worked.
Not because they understood it,
but because it touched that place in them where words don’t work either.

That’s the whole point.

Some things don’t want to be explained.
They just want to exist.
So I let them.

On linen. In oil.
In silence.

— Manja