Life is made of ups and downs, curves and climbs. Sometimes you go so fast that your head spins and you’re a little scared. Maybe of losing your balance, maybe of discovering that you don’t have anything to hold on to.
Other times, however, the days pass so slowly that you wonder if the noise you hear is the wind outside or simply that of your thoughts.
I’m afraid of immobility. Maybe this is why I draw or paint shapes that seem to move. Sometimes they dance, sometimes they play hide and seek.
Creating for me is freeing the soul. It’s relieving the heart and the head and the whole body of the burdens it carries.
Behind many of my artworks there is pain but it’s only used to dilute the colors. Drop by drop my tears dissolve the paint and transform into something positive.
It’s a process, it’s a journey. That changes you completely.
I always start full of emotions that make me tremble. The journey ends with the soul finally at peace and a thousand sparkling colors. There is what’s behind my art. It’s pure emotion put on paper… or canvas. It’s very intuitive. I often sketch directly from my imagination. Then I dilute the colors and wait for the instinct to tell me which one I want to use next.
It’s rare for me to erase, because you can’t simply erase your feelings, right?
Against the tears was born from the desire to feel good (again), from the need to fight the ugliness of a dark and sad day. I started with Burnt Sienna and Lewis Capaldi.
While I was painting I was like in a vortex, color after color, brushstroke after brushstroke, a new reality, a new world was emerging.
It’s as if I took a tangle of thoughts and put them into a kind of machine that gives them new meaning through colors and shapes. And everything that was negative and ugly and scary and painful no longer exists because it has changed shape: it has become a flower or a cloud and now it flies free in the sky.
Against the tears is a tribute to an inner strength. It’s for those who, when they hit rock bottom, close their eyes, grit their teeth and tell themselves that they won’t give up. And so they find a new, unbelievable strength. This is for you.
For anyone new, let me introduce myself: my name is Marina Ester Castaldo (yes, what a long name, I know!), I’m 34 years old and I’m an artist. I was born and raised in Italy but I’ve lived and worked in London, UK, for almost 8 years.
My specialty? Hyper-coloured, often (and increasingly) abstract landscapes, sometimes full of dense patterns, other times simple and instinctive.
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