When I felt disconnected from myself, couldn’t process my feelings, I turned to painting.
It literally has changed my life, it opened up so many ways to express myself, it helped me grief, (read more about me starting to paint after losing my father here). It learned me to connect to "me" again, to tap into my intuition, but it also gave me a whole new world of understanding other people being like me.
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Being a sensitive and introvert person doesn’t make it easy to express yourself. 
When you do not have or do not know a way to express all those feelings
​inside of you, things can be tough.
It feels like you are in a boat drifting away, further and further from yourself.
​At least, that's how it could feel for me.

But quite soon I wanted to stop painting from pictures, it didn't feel like what I was supposed to paint. I wanted to paint without an example and not copying things. I didn't want to paint realistic anymore. I wanted to paint what I felt, to paint from inside is how I use to call it.
​But how do you stop painting realistic and do you start painting from inside,  intuitively?

Overcoming grief

I think his death was one of the most devastating things I’ve been going through, and for two years I was in a kind of pause. I couldn’t do it, I wasn’t able to digest that kind of grief. I just lived life and put the pain away like it wasn't there. Until after two years something happened, I started to notice that I felt so much better being around my father’s easel and his paints.
And so I finally decided I wanted to start painting and so my healing journey began.

Hi and welcome to my new blog,
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My name is Marielle, I’m from the Netherlands.
Together with my husband I live in Spain. We have two children, a daughter and a son. Only since a few years can I say “I am an Artist” without doubting my own words.


Art as my healing.

I started painting in 2016, at the age of 44.
It was more than two years since my father had passed away.
Being around his painting supplies was comforting and slowly I felt the growing need to start painting like he had done.
Finally I began painting with his paints which I had inherited.