Pigments on linen
Portuguese Sycomore Wood Frame
43 7/10 × 44 1/10 × 1 2/5 in
111 × 112 × 3.5 cm

Since her experience in Japan, Filipa has been fascinated by pigments and the cooking performance of the painting process. For that, she hasn't been using paint tubes, preferring, instead, the slowly and dedicated method of grinding, mixing, blending, and findings the textures and irregularities that she so appreciates in her final works.

Culturally significant, most of these paintings are made using hand-woven textiles that, from plant fibers, talk about Portuguese soil, its true origin.
Layers and layers of soft watery colors bring together an unpredictable and self-isolated image of what can be soil, sky, or water. It is natural for the artist to walk around and to collect – to bring home some objects, being them stones, leaves, twigs, and moss.

“The imaginary of my works comes from everywhere, not only the villages I grew up in. The Portuguese mountainside, the dryness of its soil, the calming rivers appear as much as the Japanese greenery in its fullness, the Northern Vietnamese lakes, as well as the wintery city gardens, like Berlin’s. Sometimes the first lines come from a specific place and end up somewhere else, but mostly, it is a composition of different instances in a new atmospheric reality. While traveling, I draw, paint - collect travel diaries - but once I start a painting, each canvas starts empty, without anticipation of what will appear, hence the persistence of my practice” Filipa Tojal.