STUDIO NOTES : Imperfection Is Honest
Letting mistakes belong, in art and life.
Hi. I’m changing how I share my letters here. From now on, more personal essays will be free to read for 24 hours and then archived for paid subscribers. Studio Notes will remain open to everyone. I’m learning to receive as much as I give, and this shift is part of that.
This letter touches on a few things: how art and life reflect each other, the beauty of imperfection, the importance of memory, and serves as a visual journal with reflections.
All currently available paintings can be viewed and purchased here.
Last year, I created very little art. I was in shock, in grief, my own trauma activated, watching genocide unfold on our screens. And still. About six months ago, I made a promise to return to my practice. To process the pain. To stay with the questions. To keep creating, even when the world is burning. I had asked myself more than once: what’s the point?
However, after writing more and listening more deeply, I remembered that my art is my activism. My connection to spirit. My way of resisting systems that want us numb, exhausted, disconnected, and obedient.
We all have a part to play. Mine keeps circling back to the act of making. Because the art I create is not just decoration, it’s frequency. It’s energy. It’s an embodiment of something unseen, something alive. And in a world so drained of soul, meaning, and ancestral expression, art should not just fill a space. It should stir something. Remind you. Inspire you. Connect you back to life.
On a personal level, I remember how I used to journal for days on end, and if I made one mistake, I’d rip the pages up and start over. Perfection felt like survival. I believed that if I could just get it right, I’d be safe. But I see now that even that was inherited from the systems we live in. Systems that teach us to edit ourselves, to seek approval, to shape our expression into something palatable. Systems that reward performance over presence and pressure us to reach for something impossible.
As many of you know from connecting with me here and on Instagram, water has been my teacher, my home. Painting with watercolors has become a form of medicine in every way, a healing that runs deep and often arrives in unexpected places. It’s wild that after ten years of making art, I’ve only recently arrived at watercolors. But it’s a reminder that the spirits don’t move on our timeline. Growth isn’t linear. Readiness takes shape in its own rhythm, without our interference.
The wild splashes, the softness, and the unpredictability reflect who I am at my core. And as I paint, I hold the truth that the mess is part of the story, that the mistake is part of becoming, that imperfection is honest.
When I journal now, I don’t rip out pages to start over. I cross out words and keep writing. I used to fill entire pages—neat, even, complete. Now, sometimes a journaling session is just one or two sentences, something urgent that needs to be released but doesn’t require deep analysis or volume.
Things feel simpler. More effortless.
I’ve come to understand that speaking in words still forming is enough. That being misunderstood or only partly seen is part of this human journey. It’s not for others to hold my whole story; that burden has been lifted. I offer myself gentleness, allowing mistakes to rest alongside me, knowing that to be human is to be beautifully imperfect.
Both painting and motherhood are ways of returning—again and again—to myself. Not always gently, but always with truth.
Water has taught me how to carry feelings without clinging to them. How to hold reflection, even the difficult kind. How to stay soft around what’s dark.
Raising a child reshapes me daily. It calls for humility, for devotion, for the kind of self-forgetting that isn’t about disappearance but about growing beyond the edges of who I thought I was. Motherhood is an ocean, an immense, rhythmic, ever-responsive. What I come to know through art, I meet again in mothering. And what mothering teaches, I find echoing in the marks I make in the studio.
Each practice deepens the other. Both ask me to listen. To yield. To stay awake to beauty and blur, to joy and grief, to all that moves through me when I choose to stay present.
I’ve had to remind myself a thousand times: it’s not selfish to paint. It’s not naive to focus on art in a world where fascism rises fast, where Indigenous consent is dismissed, public voices erased, and the land and its people desecrated and annihilated for profit. In a world where the unwell and unwise hold power, still—I will paint. I will commune with the land, with spirit. I’ll bring medicine in the way I know how. Because it matters. Especially because the world so often insists it doesn’t matter. Because exhaustion is normalized. Because imagination is treated like a luxury. Because we’re encouraged to hand everything over to the machine, to the market, and let our connection wither. But I won’t.
Because the land remembers. And so do I. The soul lives in art; it lingers, and it hums. It waits. What we create in reverence can activate far beyond us, in another time, in another body, in another place where the remembering is needed.
With love,
Vanja
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