About Maria

Art has always been my retreat — a place where I can be completely in my head, be silly, and build worlds that belong only to me. Life gets heavy. There are dark stretches and lonely seasons, and the future is rarely as clear as you'd like it to be. But color has a way of cutting through all of that. Picking up a brush and making something bright and strange and alive is its own kind of defiance.

Right now I'm in a Biology PhD program, thinking a lot about nature and the quiet it offers — the kind of peace that comes from standing in front of something vast and just letting it exist. That same feeling is what I'm chasing when I paint. A vivid life and a complicated inner world aren't mutually exclusive. If anything, one feeds the other. The mind is a wild and powerful thing, and I'd rather use mine to make something colorful than not.

The dream is to do this full time someday. Until then, I make art whenever I can and hope it does for someone else what it does for me — adds a little color, lifts something heavy, makes the ambiguity feel a little more livable. Being delusionally optimistic about that feels exactly right.