"Art has always been my way of coming home."
Four countries formed me.
I grew up in Tirana, and spent my summers on the Albanian coast.
I earned my BFA and MFA in Graphic Art at the University of Arts in Tirana.
I have lived and worked across Albania, Switzerland, and the United States.
I speak four languages — but the visual language came first. It is the only one that has never needed translation.
The abstract work began in 2020, in a closed room. The world had shut down. My mother was in Europe, behind borders I could not cross — and I was here, a new mother without my own mother, in the darkest season I have ever lived. But something else was happening in that room: when I gave birth to my son, I was being born again myself. One night I put on my headphones, turned the music up, and did the only thing that made sense: I danced and painted. No plan, no subject — just movement and color. The next morning I looked at that first layer and loved it. It was the first thing in a long time that felt like light. I have been painting that way ever since.
My paintings are not about flowers, and they are not about the sea — those are the languages I speak, not the subject. The subject is memory: what it felt like, not what it looked like. I am not painting flowers for the sake of flowers; every garden in my work is an emotional landscape. And the waters are the waters of my childhood — the Ionian and the Adriatic, the Albanian coast, painted entirely from memory.
I paint without pure black. Even when I need shadow or depth, I build it from color — deep violets, muted greens, warm earth tones — because I believe even life’s darkest moments are made of experiences, relationships, lessons, and love. Darkness is never empty. It still contains color. And the dove in my mark is freedom — the line of my own hand letting go into flight
My first abstract was painted in a room the world had shut. So I know firsthand what a painting can do: it can hand happiness back to you. It can set something free. It can turn a light on in a dark year. But this work is not only for the hard seasons — it is for everyone. For anyone who sees the light and believes in it. For anyone who stands in front of a canvas and recognizes something they already carry. That is what every painting that leaves my studio is for.