How a Long-Time Collector Lives with Art: Eva’s Reflections on Presence, Integrity, and the Quiet Life of a Painting

There is a particular kind of testimony that cannot be orchestrated. It emerges in the personal spaces where a work has already taken root in someone’s life, long after the transaction is over, long after the painting has settled into the rhythm of a home. When clients speak from that place, they reveal something essential about what it means to live with art over years, even decades.

Eva, one of my first international long-time collectors, never hesitated in how she described what it feels like to live with one of my paintings. For her, the defining quality has always been its presence. She describes an integrity that is not dependent on time or circumstance, a steadiness that remains the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is, as she says, an energetic truth that cannot be quantified or manufactured, because it does not originate from strategy. It originates from the artist’s interior.

Her description, “you share a piece of your soul with those who should find it,” touches the core of my practice. For me, the paintings begin as translations of lived experience: the tensions, the questions, the ruptures, the quiet recognitions. Over time they become a language of their own, one that meets people precisely where they are. Collectors often tell me that the work integrates seamlessly into their spaces, not because it disappears, but because it listens. It is there when they need it, and it withdraws when silence is more appropriate. Many describe it as a quiet form of communication, almost a secret vocabulary that grows more articulate the longer the work stays with them.

This continuity materializes out of a practice shaped by patience, by craft, and by the deep belief that art is not an object but a companion. The Sorbets, in particular, were created to carry lightness and depth simultaneously. Over the years they have become markers in people’s homes, quiet witnesses to seasons of change. They do not age out of relevance. They root themselves in the life unfolding around them.

In the final moments of the accompanying video, there is a brief glimpse of me in the late 1990s before one of my earliest sold works—a small Lollipop color study, that became the first piece someone chose to take home. I was young, untested, and unsure whether the language I was trying to form through color and material would ever meet another person with clarity. Yet that early purchase taught me something that has shaped every year since: people recognize sincerity. They respond to the inner force of a work even before they have words for it. That moment marked the beginning of a path I have walked ever since, and I remain deeply grateful that I am still able to work in this field decades later.

Thank you, A. Xx