Hi, I’m Paula Gasparini-Santos, an immigrant born artist from Brazil. I am a painter, a mental health therapist, and a poet and my artwork is the marriage of those three passions --because art, words, and mental health really don’t exist as separate for me. I love expression, and I find that the cathartic, the chaotic discharge, the sublimation, the process of uncovering an image or words, is very much the same process that I find in self-discovery and personal development and healing. I would say that there isn’t a single painting I have painted that isn’t packed with what is personal, meaningful, painful, or emotional inside of myself. My canvas is typically the container for all these things, and so as I change it changes. My figures are sometimes bathed in tears when my life is filled with grief, sometimes there is flowers surrounding the background when I feel rejuvenated, figures embrace when I’m in love, they fall apart when I feel hurt. They pretty much change as I do—and I find them all beautiful and so in a way my art has always taught me to love every process of humanity that I experience.
For example the work you see on these walls today, are deeply personal and yet they also recount the stories of countless women or just individuals who come into my therapy office. There is often patterns of trauma, there is patterns of relationship dynamics that I encounter as a mental health therapist. And so on one of these pieces it says “as palavras dao direcao” In English this translates to “Words give direction” In this painting I recount the pain I witness in the women who come to my therapy chair, and then on the opposite side is a young woman crouched, hands clasped, in introspection as I witness other’s pain in relationships but then experience my own. This piece is titled “Words create a sense of life” “Palavras criam um sentido para a vida”. And then centered in between those two pieces is essentially the autobiography of my heart. This piece hangs surrounded by a sea of poetry written in Portuguese. The image displays a tired woman laying down in a sea of water, her posture is defeated yet there is a sense of not giving up in her, as she reaches up, clinging on to hope as her hands reach for an open eye, as she drinks from the wisdom inside of a heart. She lies beneath a man and in there you see a sense of stubbornness, his defenses, his ego and it tires her, But she lays there in the water, surrounded by the words that are almost like a balm to her wounding. The words beneath her ground and they ground her. the poem reads in Portuguese:
The woman is soft,
she remains like the water in the ocean,
receptive to everything,
and in her power nothing changes the way she is tender and soft,
not even the pain that cuts through the vein of her surface like a ship.
She doesn't give into it because her heart tells her
“You dear are not the tide, nor the rain or lightning that you see on your surface,
you dear are the most powerful force in nature,
You my love,
are the water...
And water is everything,
So it’s ok to be Soft, like the vein of the planet,
Because water heals, water grows, water is life.
and You are Water”
