My life in a painting

I am Fatima, and this is my story told by the canvas itself.

It all began with an urgent need to express what I carried inside. Not words, not gestures. Just red. That visceral red that flowed into my veins like lava. I silently prepared my space, placing the objects in front of me—not for their shape, but for what they evoked. A round bottle, a glass jar, a coffee pot, a simple cup with dormant paintbrushes. My everyday world. My silent confidants.

The first stroke was a sigh. Then the others came like gusts of emotion. I painted with my hands, with the brushes, with rage, with tenderness. Red filled everything, like a tide impossible to stop. Every shadow I applied, every shine I suggested, was a part of me that detached itself and remained in that scene.

As I painted, I spoke to them. The coffee pot reminded me of my grandmother, always at the fire, always ready to receive. The jar was my childhood stored in invisible candies. The bottle, an echo of lonely nights where only silence accompanied me. And the cup... that cup was me. Simple, ordinary, but full of tools that create, that transform, that imagine.

This painting is not a still life. It is my fragmented self-portrait, hidden in objects that most wouldn't even look twice at. I, Fátima, gave them a voice. I gave them fire. I gave them my red. And even though the world spins obliviously, I know that in this corner of the canvas, I breathe whole.

The artist behind the painting is my sister Fatima, a student at the University of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires.
She also wrote the work.