SanitaBalode 

Inspiration is everywhere

I grew up in Latvia, and some of my earliest memories are tied to the wild white beaches there, and a sea that is cold and untamed. I still travel back, again and again, just to stand by that water and feel it. To bring that feeling and those colours back with me into the studio.

​I now find inspiration in the mountains right outside my studio in Voss,Norway. In the wild river that never moves the same way twice, and in the snow that arrives early and stays long after it should.

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Glimmers of weather changing mid day, the sound of a river pushing through rock are all recurring motifs within my work. These moments hold something I cannot fully explain, and I try to capture that in my art, inviting you to pause, the way I have learned to pause, and feel what lies beneath the surface of things.

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My creative process is intuitive and physical. I work in oil, layer over layer, letting colour push against colour until something true rises. This is how I step out of the hamster wheel, not by thinking harder, but by slowing down enough to listen. To myself. To the mountain. To the weather moving in.

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The layers in my work are often built up and then partly let go of, the way snow covers a landscape and then melts back to reveal what was always underneath. This method holds the feeling of something shaped by time and by elements outside my control.

It is an exploration of how nature marks the land, and how that same nature marks us, and how listening closely enough to it can lead to real understanding, and to a kind of kindness, toward the world and toward ourselves.