Once I danced with my Flames, I became Still Water
I began my journey with blonde hair and blue eyes — and somewhere along the way, war paints found their place across my face. Never my heart.
From fire-red passion to dawn-white surrender, from the turquoise of calm waters to the molten orange of emotional lava, my life has been anything but still.
For fifteen years, I taught English and mentored high school students. Later, I led an association supporting survivors of sexual assault — a role I carried for five intense years.
But in 2019, after years of giving and absorbing others’ pain, I felt just had to start over, to heal myself.
One day, with no training and no plan, I painted. It wasn’t a hobby. It was a calling.
As if something ancient and buried burst forth and said: I’ve been waiting.
I was never the artist — I was the mom, the speaker, the teacher, the fighter.
But from that first painting, I knew:
this is about truth.
I returned to a forgotten language — one I had glimpsed as a child and lost.
Each canvas became a mirror, a map, a memory.
My fears, my hopes, the light I’d hidden, the darkness I’d carried — all of it poured into the paint.
That first act of creation was the beginning of peace.
And the beginning of a new life.
I create emotionally driven abstract and surreal paintings.
They are fragments of forgotten moments, flickers of memory from a mind that forgets but a heart that remembers.
Each piece is a vessel — of dissonance and harmony, pain and release, shadow and light.
I paint not just what I’ve lived, but what I feel deeply — and what I know others feel, too.
The universal threads of womanhood, nature, healing, desire, childhood, trauma, and joy — they run through every stroke.
These are not illustrations.
They are expressions.
They are dances.
Today, I create museum-quality original paintings and custom artworks, often tailored to clients’ inner landscapes or designed to complete the energy of a space.
Interior designers and collectors turn to me not only for aesthetics, but for connection. For storytelling. For soul.
My works have found homes around the world — in private collections, curated interiors, and hearts that beat in rhythm with mine.
This is a story with a heroine.
And yes — she wins in the end.
Let me paint your dance.
— Shani