My childhood takes place in bucolic Romania, more precisely Transylvania, dotted with ancestral beliefs, primary forests, and a nature free from industrialization. As a child, I personalized trees, bugs, birds, and clouds and created a fantasy theater where stories slip through a suspended time. I used to build and destroy these stage-sets to travel to the ends of the Earth, but the planet got too tiny and forced me to propel myself into the stars. My memories from that time are the richest and most precious treasures. There, where everything was possible, imaginable, and changeable; I, alive on tiptoe, watched over the smooth running of this world, grabbing my magic wand to embellish or dramatize the sequences. The windows in my room turned into a giant screen where I placed my characters. At the end of the alley, the colossal poplar kept my sacred wishes and secrets. Its immeasurable proportion, in my child's eyes, created the link with the stars. Virtually all of my stories started there, at its gnarled roots, and ended in distant galaxies. Later on, when I reviewed the actual size of my poplar, I was amazed; I preferred my memories then. Every change in the surrounding nature was loaded with meanings of paramount importance. I witnessed crucial events that I had to immortalize in my sketchbook. There was no bad season to go through until summer. The rainy springs and autumns prompted me to write poetry and listen nostalgically to songs from elsewhere. Winter dressed giants from other planets coming on Earth to instruct me. In the summer, I crackled with life and the desire to roll in the wildflowers fields. Each day was marked by the lack of time and the desperation of the seconds that hasten to pass. In doing so, I blessed the dream maker. For once, through Crystal's gate I was safe from the threat of time. Dreams helped me experience reality; dreams nourished me with divine desires that turned into boundless creative energy.
The drawing was my best friend, counselor, and confessor. As I learned to draw, I moved away from the source, the joy of expressing myself freely. The drawing became tedious, I discovered the proportions, the axes, the perspective, the shading, and the framing; magic became labor. Fortunately, in color, everything became possible again. During my teenage years, I took academic classes at the Oradea Art School in Romania, an experience that allowed me to learn several basic techniques. Studying art history pushed me to identify with the myth of the tormented and romantic artist who did not correspond to my personality overflowing with vitality. For many years, I lived under the skin of these two antagonistic characters; a girl in love with life and the other girl tormented to follow the existing model of the great artist.
When leaving Eastern Romania, I was dazzled by the opulent Western world, parading a scale of values opposed to those I had learned. Communist Romania did not allow people to stand out for their material wealth. To succeed, you had to bet on talent, artists being highly regarded. My metamorphosis was rapid and my only anchoring in the past was the poetic literature of my roots. I first exhibited my work in Geneva in Switzerland, then in the United States, where part of my family had emigrated.
My false beliefs had materialized in this duality of construction versus destruction. Homeless, I crossed the Atlantic between Europe and America in search of belonging. I painted a lot during long hours of solitude to calm the emerging anxieties of this paradox I was living. These two characters, the isolated and almost wild artist and this artsy-friendly protagonist, lover of social evenings and thirsty for social life, plunged me into confusion as to what my real identity was. Despite the success, despite the sale of my works and the exhibitions that followed, a void was growing in my bowels year after year. I desperately searched for the Truth and a Sense o f Existence in E astern and Western philosophy, in science, and religions. In all this research, high-energy physics and psychoanalysis have only offered me limited and frustrating answers.
But there was that morning. This morning, when the unexpected light of March penetrated every nook and cranny of the earth, flooded the day before. The seed has germinated and on its greenish stalk, like a trophy, dark green leaves were about to blow up the shell of the seed. I was bewildered, transposed, and amazed at this metamorphosis, which is far beyond my comprehension. Just yesterday, I held this seed in my hand like an inert form without guessing its potential. The theater opens up again, and the insects, trees, birds, and clouds return to unveil the stories I left unfinished as a child. The Truth sprang up like a light at the end of a tunnel that choked me for decades; I am alive again, on tiptoe, and I dig my fingers into this hot earth; it welcomes me without resentment for having deserted it for cocktail parties, trendy bars and noisy clubs.
The brushes have become extensions of my fingers again; the color bursts into laughter on these tame canvases, mocking the heaviness of theory. Everything escapes me; the painting has its thought and I let it guide me. I become again a child who has found her magic wand.