Oana Greab
Fărcaș.

Art begins where I feel.

For me, art is an expression of a woman’s inner life: the ways I love, fear, hope, withdraw and find the strength to open myself again. I paint what moves within me before it has a name. Sometimes it is passionate love, an energy that asks for the whole canvas. At other times it is an almost imperceptible unease, a quiet tenderness, or the stillness I seek among so many converging feelings.

Love has many ways of bringing light.

I am interested in the full reach of love: the impulse towards closeness, desire, trust, longing, and the fear of losing what I cherish. Its intensity can fill a red, draw forms together, or leave a space between them that says more than proximity. I do not seek a definitive image of it. I follow its changes.

A woman’s inner world, open to others.

I begin with my own experience as a woman, without claiming to speak for every woman. Within this inner life there is tenderness and strength, the wish to protect and the wish to leave, the need for closeness and the need for a space of my own. I am drawn to the way these impulses can contradict one another without cancelling each other out.

What begins intimately can become familiar to someone else. One viewer may recognise a longing; another, the courage to change or a stillness they did not know they were seeking. This encounter matters to me: to begin with a feeling of my own and leave the image open enough for the life of the person looking at it.

Colour gives emotion a body.

In painting, a feeling acquires weight, rhythm and a surface. Colour can advance with conviction, hesitate, or allow light to pass between layers. Oil on canvas lets me work with this density: bringing tones together, preserving the trace of a gesture, and allowing one form to change in relation to another.

An image you can stay with.

I do not want a text to close a painting inside an explanation. Words can open a door towards it, but the encounter belongs to each viewer. You might enter through a colour, a form that reminds you of something, or a feeling for which you do not yet have words.

I want my paintings to invite a return. To hold something that does not reveal itself immediately, and offer another kind of closeness on another day. If someone standing before a painting gives themselves time to feel, a connection has already formed between their inner world and mine.