ABOUT & PRESS
Collecting
Light
Life became my greatest teacher.
It showed me that light isn't the absence of darkness. It is born from it.
My paintings are about that quiet choice: to keep looking towards the light.
MEET THE ARTIST
WHY I PAINT
I was still a child when I lost my brother in an accident.
My childhood and the years that followed were not easy. Looking back now, there were times when life seemed to place one obstacle after another in my way.
And yet, somehow, there was always a light.
Something that kept pulling me forward. A quiet belief that life could be different. That somewhere beyond what I could see at that moment, there was a place I wanted to reach.
Today, I sometimes look at my life and wonder how I got here.
I studied Landscape Architecture at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna — a path that deepened my connection to nature and shaped the way I see landscapes, space and our place within them.
And then, life gave me a family of my own. I became a mother, and discovered a kind of love so deep that I could never have imagined it as a child.
Eventually, that way of seeing found its way onto canvas.
The landscapes I paint are not simply places. They are about finding a way through. About distance and possibility. About the small human figure standing before something vast — and the light that pulls them toward it.
In so many ways, I have built the life I once hoped for.
Not because the difficult things never happened.
But because they didn't get to decide where I would end up.
That is the light I paint. Not the absence of darkness — but proof that we can move through it.
I want to give you that same light. A piece of it, hanging in your home. A reminder, on the days you need it most, that you can keep going toward the life you long for.
That is Collecting Light.
MY PROCESS
My work brings together digital image-making and traditional painting.
Before I begin working on the physical canvas, I spend a great deal of time developing each composition digitally — exploring light, color, atmosphere, proportions, and the story I want the finished painting to tell.
Photoshop has been part of my creative life for almost 20 years. During my studies in landscape architecture, I also worked extensively with a wide range of graphic and visualization programs. Over time, combining this technical knowledge with the tactile, physical process of painting naturally became part of my own artistic practice.
Once the composition is fully developed, it is printed onto canvas to serve as the foundation of the painting.
From there, the physical painting process begins. I work by hand across the entire canvas, building the piece with paint and substantial layers of impasto. Light, atmosphere, movement, depth of color, and above all the distinctive three-dimensional surface of my work are developed through these painted layers.
The print is not a finished image to which I simply add a few brushstrokes or touches of texture. It is the foundation upon which I continue to develop the painting, layer by layer. The visible and tactile texture of my originals is real paint, often applied very generously and almost sculpturally.
The digital image remains beneath the painting as part of the process. The finished artwork is intentionally a meeting of two worlds I have worked with and loved for many years: digital image-making and traditional, highly textural painting.
I see digital tools as artistic tools, just as artists throughout history have used different methods to develop and transfer their ideas onto a final surface — from grids, tracing and transfer drawings to projection, photography, and today’s digital possibilities.
The tools evolve. What matters to me is what we create with them.
Every Turlitu original is individually conceived and developed by me, built upon canvas, painted by hand, and finished in my studio.
PAST EXHIBITIONS 2024 - 2026
