The series that keeps pulling me forward
The studio is full again
and the table feels more alive every day. Paintings are multiplying, but so are the small studies on paper scattered around them. I keep going back to sketching, testing colours, shapes, marks, and combinations before moving onto the canvases.
What started as preparation slowly became a whole collection of little works on paper on their own.
When I started this series back in February, with only “palm trees” and a stack of blank canvases as a starting point, I didn’t realise how much space these paintings would end up taking in my mind and in the studio.
I thought I was starting a botanical series, but somewhere along the way, the paintings became something else entirely.
The studio gets messier as the paintings get clearer.
Not botanical paintings after all
As I was journalling recently, I realised these paintings feel much closer to portraits than botanical studies.
They remind me of photobooth strips you make with friends to keep a memory alive — each one slightly different, with its own personality, colours, rhythm, and attitude.
Like photobooth strips — same character, different moods.
A new way of working
Because I spent most of 2025 away from the studio, I also had time to think differently about how I wanted to work once I came back. I started drawing palm trees in a sktchbook I kept on my desk at my day job, slowly collecting shapes and ideas without really knowing where they would lead.
When I finally returned to the studio, I already had a direction.
I went to the glass house at the Prague Botanical Garden to gather more inspiration, then kept sketching, making studies, collecting references, and building a mood board and colour palette before touching the canvases. This was new for me.
For the first time, I built a whole visual world before painting.
And I’m so glad I did. Instead of searching for direction directly on the canvases, I now always have something to come back to: sketches, studies, colours, photos. Somehow, all this preparation made the process feel more free, not less. It gave me confidence, but also the desire to keep exploring further.
The studio has slowly turned into a small exotic garden.
When the paintings started talking back
The paintings themselves started asking for more.
At first, the canvases only shared colours and a few marks. To help myself move forward, I made miniature versions of them on paper, testing compositions and layers.
That’s when I realised I wanted to focus on only a few recurring plant shapes and repeat them over and over again, to get to know them really well.
Little by little, I gave them backgrounds to live in: patterns, wallpapers, setting them in domestic atmospheres.
I started seeing connections between them, like a group of friends slowly appearing together in the same room.
Watching the studies slowly migrate onto the canvases.
Letting drawing fully enter the paintings
What surprised me the most is how drawing fully entered the paintings.
At the beginning of the series, I imagined drawing and collage would stay small elements inside the compositions, the way they often had in my previous work.
But instead, I let soft pastels, wax crayons, and oil sticks take much more space. I allowed myself to simply draw directly onto the paintings — palms, leaves, plants, shapes — and from there, the work became bolder and more graphic.
It’s something I had wanted for my paintings for a long time without fully knowing how to get there.
Always exploring colours and shapes, turning the table into an art lab.
Still at the beginning
Now I feel like I’m only at the beginning of this series.
The first sixteen paintings are still in progress, and at the same time I’m already thinking about moving onto bigger surfaces, with larger gestures, and new explorations. I have ideas for completely different series too, but these paintings keep calling for more.
More layers, more repetition, more surfaces.
And maybe new materials too. I have a feeling that as the paintings grow, they will ask for something else again — or at least I will. I’ll keep the door open...
