Costa Belik

For me, it usually begins with a very small shift. I might be looking at a face, or at an image I’ve had around for a while, and at some point it stops feeling neutral. It becomes heavier than it should be. I don’t think I’m trying to “translate inner states” in any clean or direct way. It’s more like I’m trying to stay with that uncomfortable moment when a portrait stops being just a face and starts feeling slightly wrong, or too present.

Recently I’ve been using flowers a lot. I’m not completely sure why. They keep coming back into the drawings before I’ve really decided to put them there. Sometimes they feel decorative, but then they also start to look anatomical, or a bit invasive, and that tension is what interests me. I used to feel like I needed to justify them somehow, but now I mostly let them appear.