Visual artist Ilze Raudiņa Follow.Art Card

About me

I am a professional painter, and a painting and drawing teacher from Latvia.
I have a bachelor’s degree in Scenography and a master’s degree in Painting from the Art Academy of Latvia. When I paint, I switch my thoughts off; I break through the layers built by my mind and ego, and this allows me to get closer to my truest self, to my inner core. This process is my absolute and essential necessity. This is meditation in its purest form for me. I experience painting as the language of my soul. It helps me translate and express my link to and connection with the Universe. When I paint, sometimes I feel that painting is not my medium, but I am the medium for something bigger than me. In nature, I particularly enjoy solitary, long walks – especially along the sea, and in the forest. All the ideas for my paintings come from observing nature and being in nature. I often see nature as an encapsulated moment of absolute happiness. I and nature, or a human being and nature – this is the explanation and essence of my soul’s vision of the world. The fusion of those two images together reflects psychological experiences and emotional states in human life based on fear, sadness, joy, faith, love, illusion, suspicion, the sense of beauty, and the sense of the presence of the transcendent. I paint my feelings, observing the all-encompassing, cosmic beauty and eeriness of nature in simultaneous relation to all living creatures. I create each painting as a separate story, allowing the subjective emotions and current events of the moment that I want to paint to influence me. I believe that reality is much bigger than our ability to perceive it with our five senses. To me, the reality is very multi-layered, multi-dimensional, and also very transparent. Matter is not reality to me. Having spent a lot of time in nature as a child, I have come to understand it intuitively, with my intuitive senses, and this feeling is the foundation of everything I paint.