“An artist´s life.”
The stories of the people behind the art
#10 Mari Caldas
“I don’t think that being an artist is something you choose. I believe that at some point in life you just realize that your only choice is to express yourself. It doesn’t matter how. You just have to.
It’s the only way, a matter of pure survival. You have to create in order to live, to be, to love, to get through sadness, to feel the joy of being alive, to breathe, to share. Life can be too real and it can get really hard sometimes. But life is also magic, precious, and being alive is a gift that we don’t think about that often. And what is being alive if not feeling? In your guts, in your heart, in your bones. It is more than doing the stuff that we need to do. It is being what you believe. It is moving with love. It is feeling the love when something moves us. There is no glamour in being an artist. There is no recipe, there is no rules. It is just a way of existing in the world. You can’t just stop what you are feeling the same way that you just can’t stop the need to create as a way of keep going.
Being an artist is also having the possibility and the gift to make someone feel something. Making a stranger feel love, sadness, despair, joy, feel alive. Just feel anything.
I truly believe that there are somethings in my life that I just can’t express in words, or hugs, or long conversations. There are things that I feel so deeply inside that I can only see in colors, shapes and movements. They are landscapes that I carry within me. This is just the way I am. I feel in colors. And in the end we all have a special way of being and that is truly beautiful. It is you being unique. It is life. It is the perfection of nature. Thank god we are all so different.
We just need to be respected, and loved, because pain will get in your way somehow, and we are going to deal with it in our own way. I paint with light when I’m happy, when I feel grateful, when everything around me is sparkling, when I feel love, when I feel that I love everything and everybody, when I’m feeling inspired, but also when I’m feeling sad, lonely, when nothing makes sense, when I just want to get through something, when I want the present to be the past. Because that is the way life flows. And there is no problem to feel what you don’t want to feel sometimes. This is the balance of nature. And I’m sure that you are going to feel the joy again. We love, we get hurt, we love again. And that is maybe the only thing that we all have in common. We are fluid beings. We are all artists.
Love, Mari.”
Words and images by Mari Caldas
