Some paintings arrive fully formed. Most of mine do not. They accumulate — over months, over versions, over what I see, what I feel, what I lose. What you see in the final work is only the surface. Beneath it, there are people. There are places, people, thoughts, emotions, steps, overlays. There is a lot of destruction and re-imagination before it reaches to a stage where it becomes presentable. I have canvases that are rolled in the half imaginative process for months and they cross the finish line magically in a matter of a day. Even I can't remember how each painting came into being as it stands now and repeat it even if I want it.
After moving to Lisbon in 2025, in our small apartment for lack of working space and a working studio, I started working on small scale and in the constantly inspiring cityscapes and travels - I changed gears and worked on a lot of plein air - digging deep into my Chicago days when a bunch of artists used to mean on Saturday mornings to go paint Chicago attractions.
While I was drawing from the ever inspiring landscapes of Lisbon, Croatia and Egypt, my work was getting created inside me - I just had to get it on the canvas.
The ingredients.
These trips and plein air sketches kept my artistic drive alive in Lisbon where I had no place to stretch or hang a canvas and only a small table space in our studio. My hand was moving - waiting for ignition.
2024-25 was also the year of several personal losses, transition, and turmoil - which was perhaps the fodder for the creative process.
During this time I also discovered the genius of Fernando Pessoa and fell in love with his poetry.
I can't move forward without writing a few words about this genius.
https://www.casafernandopessoa.pt/pt/cfp
My painting is a visual dialogue with Tabacaria, capturing the texture of solitude in a man who felt like a void containing everything. It explores the precise, often painful boundary between our inner lives and the world outside.
This piece emerged from a constant stream of sketchbook impressions, but Pessoa’s poem was always the heartbeat of the project. The painting’s own physical journey mirrors its evolution; I started it on a rolled canvas while living in the narrow streets of Graça and only saw it through to completion once it was stretched on a frame in Estoril.
Graca (Lisbon)
Living, walking the same cobblestoned routes every day - the yellow facades, the blue-framed windows, the tiled rooftops, the particular quality of afternoon light on old plaster — all of it was entering me slowly.
This was the view from our small studio where we lived in Graca. It had all the old city charm, very beautiful - but very small and touristy and very hilly, and ultimately - in about a year, we decided to move to Estoril (a subarban space) with a little extra space for me to paint.
The first version of this large scale painting was a hotchpotch photographs, postcards collected from the Thieves' Market in Graca, the curved streets, the buildings, the graffiti and a photograph of a old woman and a baby on the streets.
I rolled the canvas on the floor and started working on it as waiting for a large place or studio was not possible.
The impressions, the invisible grief, the poetry - spilled out on the canvas.
The first version had much more - the memories, the losses that I won't speak of here. People who occupied space in my life in ways I am still measuring. As time passed, they went behind the curtain but the traces are still there.
The Apartment I Left Behind
As we made a move to our new place,a charming neighbourhood with the grace of old Portugal and an oceanside life, I still missed my old place in Graca. Our new apartment is on a small inner alley with a lovely Portuguese café where I go for coffee, sometimes a pastry, and to practice my lame Portuguese.
My painting was stuck for a want of structure and perspective. and a month went by.
New and old apartment (above and below)
I was adjusting to the new hood. The cafes, the world around me and inside me.
I loved my new cafe. The staff is kind, the patrons are extraordinary — a mirror into Portuguese culture, and a gift for an artist who wants to sketch.
I had photographed this curved cafe building with a blue frame, my own reflection appearing alongside a poster of a face inside the glass. Inside and outside, past and present, the observer and the observed — all collapsed into one surface. That image lodged itself in me. It was exactly what I had been circling
Pessoa wrote about this. About the self that can only know itself by looking outward. About the window as the precise threshold between the private interior and the indifferent world.
Something clicked and then this was the next version. A structural shift. The past needed to go behind the curtain. Just as the days go back and we try to put grief and moments of joy behind us — these images went under the inner layer of the painting and a new skin started forming.
Structures of today started taking over the memories of the past. Structurally It wasn’t still not perfect.
IMO, An abstract painting has to be structurally more sound than realism. An artist knows when it is. I wasn't.
I had worked this small sketch before leaving our old apartment - which I missed a lot. It came to rescue again, in solving some of the structural imbalances of the painting.
The Painting Within the Painting
In the thisl stage, I added the easel. An unfinished canvas propped in the centre of the room. On it: a figure in pain, screaming — a figure that connects this work to an older body of paintings about duality, about the warm self and the cool self, the eye that sees from the chest rather than the head.
The sofa. The lamp. The iron balcony rail. These are not props. They are evidence of a life lived in a specific room, at a specific moment, that no longer exists.
With this on my mind, I superimposed the studio sketch onto the larger exterior canvas — giving the painting its inside/outside view. The compositional architecture locked into place: the teal sofa, the globe lamp, the balcony window on the left, the wide Graça window on the right, the dark slate wall holding the centre.
The view through the right window is not literal — the terracotta roof, the yellow facade — it is an abstract vision, a memory of the city assembled from everything I had absorbed. What is more than real is the figure in the left window: the red-haired woman, a patron from the café at the end of the alley in Estoril. She wandered into the painting uninvited and refused to leave. She watches, as we all do, from the inside.
The figure on the easel connects to this earlier series — two selves in dialogue
A mid-stage of the interior — before the easel arrived, before the final decisions
The easel transforms the painting. The room is no longer just a room — it is an artist's room. The empty sofa is now the sofa of someone who has stepped away from the canvas for a moment, or perhaps forever. The unfinished painting within the painting asks: what does it mean to leave something incomplete (Remember the Monet's unfinished canvas in Chicago) ? What lives in the gap between intention and resolution?
My paintings evolved. They move through versions. They hold people who have left. The figures that are gone are not gone — they are behind the curtain, in the layers, in the grey wall that seems empty but is not.
This is what I mean when I say a painting accumulates. Every version is present in the final one. Every person I placed there and then painted over is still there, breathing under the surface.
Pessoa never published Tabacaria in his lifetime. He kept it in a trunk with thousands of other pages — an entire interior world, unseen. After his death, they found 27,543 documents in that trunk. Letters, poems, unfinished novels, philosophical fragments, heteronyms — other selves he had invented to live inside.
I think about that trunk often. About what it means to make things that accumulate, that layer, that hold the unspeakable beneath the visible. About the curtain as not a concealment but a form of care — for those who are gone and for the private, for the things that are too large to show directly.
In the final work, the heavy grey wall holds all of that beneath it. The curtain on the left — white, translucent, painted with the same honesty as the iron balcony rail below it — is not decoration. It is a threshold. It marks the boundary between what is shown and what is kept. Between the public painting and the private grief.
At the same time the Tobacaria was humming inside me. The painting was not growing.
I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing.
I can't want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.
— FERNANDO PESSOA, TABACARIA (TOBACCO SHOP)
Pessoa's Tabacaria is a poem about the self that watches from a window while life happens in the street below. The Tobacco Shop is across the road — real, specific, ordinary. The speaker is inside. He has grand ideas and no capacity to act on them. He is, in his own words, nothing. And yet — all the dreams of the world. That is the emotional territory of this painting. The interior as the place where we hold everything we cannot say outside.
2025 was the year of losses, of movement, of discovery. This painting carries all of it. As does every painting I make that matters.
This painting is still in progress. As are all the ones that matter.
— SATISH · ESTORIL, LISBON · 2026
