I was born into art — not just as a practice, but as a way of being. My earliest memories are soaked in the smell of oil paint, in the quiet presence of my father, Mârza Ioan Traian, himself a painter and later my teacher. He didn’t just show me how to hold a brush — he handed me the language of color before I even knew how to speak my own truth.

He kept my childhood drawings, the ones I made at five. Back then, I didn’t understand why.

Now I do.

He saw something in me — and refused to let it fade.

I spent my early years in Mănărade, a small village near Blaj, before moving to Alba Iulia. That’s when everything came alive. My father had just returned from his art studies in Bucharest and opened a gallery in the heart of the city. He began teaching at the local art high school, and I, in turn, began living a lifE surrounded by creation.

Exhibitions. Art camps. Canvas and conversation. Brushes and breath.

I didn’t grow up around art.

I grew up inside it.

Over the years, life took me into unexpected places — places that broke me and shaped me at once. At 21, as a student at the University of Arts in Timișoara, I was arrested and spent a year and a half in prison. Even then, I kept painting. I took my exams. I graduated on time.

But life had more trials to hand me.

Soon after, I fell severely ill. Polyradiculoneuritis — an autoimmune storm that paralyzed me, robbed me of my sight, and left me floating in the sterile cold of Intensive care for three months. When I began walking again, I discovered the pain in my leg was necrosis. A total hip replacement followed — in Brussels. I returned to Romania on crutches and kept working, this time on opening a cultural space in the Alba Iulia Citadel. In the middle of that pain, I opened an underground club. I started DJing. I created space for expression, rebellion, release.

But behind the energy, the music, the nights without sleep — I was unraveling.

Another arrest came in 2017. Another fall. Another silence. That silence turned into two years of reflection. I built a guesthouse. I worked with wood. I worked with my hands. I remembered what it feels like to create something slowly. To breathe while building. To find peace in something real.

And then — I returned to painting.

Only this time, I returned fully. With everything I had left. And I realized what I had been chasing through all the chaos, through the music, the projects, the mistakes, the pain — was there, waiting for me.

It had always been there.

Chaos and Repetition. Familiarity and Madness.

My current work lives in the tension between what is familiar and what is fractured. I use pop culture characters — cartoons we all grew up with — but I place them in storms of color, in visual noise, in emotional contradiction.

Why?

Because I needed a way to express the full spectrum of what I’ve lived: madness, paranoia, tenderness, shame, ecstasy, love, loss, fear. Because I needed to tell the truth in a way that people could see themselves in it, too.

Repetition is my rhythm. Chaos is my container.

Each brushstroke is a conversation between panic and stillness. Between a mind that wants to scream and a heart that wants to be heard. Mental health — with all its shadows and vulnerability — sits at the center of my work.

But I don’t want it to weigh people down. I want it to invite them in. To remind them that they are not alone in what they feel. That healing can be loud, wild, even cartoon-colored.

Now I paint mostly in oil on canvas — a return to tradition, but with a modern soul. I speak through texture, through layer, through contradiction.

My work is not clean.

It is alive.

This is What I Know

I know what it means to fall apart. I know what it means to rebuild. And I know that art — real, raw, honest art — is one of the few things that can hold us together.

Every painting I make carries a part of me that didn’t give up. A part of me that survived.

A part of me that still hopes — for peace, for connection, for beauty in brokenness. i don’t paint for applause.

I paint for meaning. For release.

For the chance that someone, somewhere, might look at one of my pieces and feel a little more seen.

If you’re here — reading this — thank you. You are part of the story now. And I hope, in my colors and my chaos,

you’ll find a small mirror of your own.