After moving to Lisbon in 2025, I found myself in a small apartment with no studio — a sharp contrast to the Chicago workspace I'd left behind, and, as any artist will tell you, the ideal condition for a creative breakthrough or a breakdown. Sometimes both, in the same afternoon.
For months, I made nothing. Not a single sketch. Then, for lack of a better option, I changed gears : small-scale work, sketching plein air, the city as studio.
I joined a sketching meetup. We met at different Lisbon cafes and outdoor locations to sketch. It brought me back to my Chicago days, when a group of artists would meet on Saturday mornings to go paint the city's landmarks — a ritual that sounds romantic but involved a lot of stress on finding parking spots (and fines).
Over those months, while I sketched Lisbon's streets and later the landscapes of Croatia and Egypt, the real work was happening inside me. The visible sketch is always the smallest part. Beneath it: everything the eye absorbed without asking permission. The landscapes entered me quietly, waiting to come out.
A photograph is a souvenir. A sketch is a scar — it stays.
The wound that becomes the work
2024–25 was also the year of several personal losses, transitions, and turmoil — which was, perhaps, the necessary fodder. Grief has a way of making itself useful in the studio, even when it is useless everywhere else.
The street does not care about your grief and there is something quietly freeing about that indifference. The world's refusal to mourn with you forces you to find the form yourself. Art is what happens when grief has nowhere else to go.
During this time I also discovered the genius of Fernando Pessoa and fell, somewhat helplessly, in love with his poetry. (to say the least).
Pessoa is a kind of artist whose work carries what you might call a wound that never closed.
Van Gogh's letters to Theo are almost unbearable to read — not because they are dramatic, but because they are so ordinary in their longing. He just wanted to paint, to be understood, to not be a burden.
Pessoa is the same, but inverted. Van Gogh bled outward — color, urgency, visible anguish. Pessoa turned inward so completely he invented other people to live inside. The grief in Tabacaria is quiet, almost bureaucratic. I'm nothing. I'll always be nothing. Said flatly, like a man reading a balance sheet of his own soul.
What makes them both devastating is that they knew. They weren't unaware of their condition — they were exquisitely, painfully articulate about it. That self-awareness without the ability to escape it is what reaches across a century and grabs you by the throat.
Fernando Pessoa lived as a humble clerk in Lisbon while secretly constructing an entire interior universe — over 70 fictional authors, each with their own biography, philosophy, and literary style. In a total rejection of the visibility central to modern culture, he chose to remain a nomadic wanderer through his own consciousness.
His masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, was found 27 years after his death in a trunk containing thousands of fragments. He never published Tabacaria in his lifetime. He kept it, like everything else, for himself.
He had no algorithm to feed, no follower count to protect, no engagement to optimize — and so, unburdened by all of that, he simply wrote the truth and put it in a trunk.
In a world that mistakes visibility for value, Pessoa chose the trunk. And the trunk outlasted everything.
Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon →
My painting is a visual dialogue with Tabacaria — an attempt to capture 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. The window as threshold. The curtain as care.
This piece emerged from a stream of some sketchbook impressions, some photographs and a lot of memories and grief but Pessoa's poem was always the heartbeat of the project. The painting's physical journey mirrors its emotional one: I started it on a rolled canvas in the narrow streets of Graça and only saw it through to completion once it was stretched on a frame in Estoril — a different place, a different light, a different self.
Graça (Lisbon)
Living in Graça meant walking the same cobblestoned routes every day — the yellow facades, the afternoon light on old plaster — all of it entering me slowly, the way cities do when you stop being a tourist and start being a resident with a bad knee from the hills.
Graça is beautiful and relentlessly hilly. After a year, we moved to Estoril — a little extra space, and the possibility of stretching a large canvas without moving the furniture into the hallway.
The first version of this painting was a hodgepodge of photographs, postcards from the Thieves' Market, the curved streets, the graffiti, an old woman and a baby on the street. I rolled the canvas on the floor and started working. The floor, it turns out, is a perfectly adequate collaborator.
The impressions, the invisible grief, the poetry — spilled out onto the canvas.
The first version held much more: the memories, the losses 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. Paint is honest that way. It remembers what you try to forget.
The Apartment I Left Behind
Moving to Estoril meant leaving Graça — and I missed it more than I expected. Our new apartment sits on a small inner alley with a lovely Portuguese café, where I go for coffee, sometimes a pastry, and to practice my Portuguese, which remains, diplomatically speaking, a work in progress.
The painting was stuck. A month went by.
Then the café gave me something.
I had photographed the curved café building with its 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. It was exactly what I had been circling without knowing it.
Pessoa wrote about this. The self that can only know itself by looking outward. The window as the precise threshold between the private interior and the indifferent world. The street doesn't care about your grief. The tobacco shop is just a tobacco shop. And yet —
There is something quietly freeing about that indifference. Art is what happens when grief has nowhere else to go.
The past needed to go behind the curtain. Those images went under the inner layer of the painting, and a new skin began to form.
I superimposed the cafe over the picture.
Structures of today started taking over the memories of the past. But structurally, it still wasn't right.
An abstract painting, in my view, has to be structurally more sound than realism — because there is nothing to hide behind. No likeness to fall back on. No recognisable face to distract from a weak composition. An artist knows when it is right. I wasn't there yet.
A small sketch I had made before leaving Graça came to rescue — one I'd almost forgotten. It solved the structural imbalances the way a good sentence solves a paragraph: quietly, completely.
The Painting Within the Painting
I superimposed the studio sketch onto the larger exterior canvas — giving the painting its inside/outside view. The compositional architecture locked into place.
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.
I added the easel. An unfinished canvas propped in the centre of the room. On it: a figure in pain — connecting this work to an older body of paintings about duality, the warm self and the cool self.
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.
The figure on the easel connects to an 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?
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. The window as the only honest border between the self and the world. The curtain as the only mercy.
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
