Gus Romano 10/2/25 Gus Romano 10/2/25

Letter from Paris, Between Dreams: Building Others While Holding My Own

In Paris, I stood backstage at L’Oréal’s show, invisible yet essential, while running at dawn to museums where Rembrandt, Monet, and Carolus-Duran reminded me of my own dream. I wonder — can my dream as an artist survive while I build the dreams of others?

Gus Romano 9/27/25 Gus Romano 9/27/25

Between Silence and Sound: Searching for Inspiration in Paint, Chess, and Rui Massena’s Music

An intimate reflection on artistic doubt and resilience. Gus Romano shares his struggle to find inspiration, his strange refuge in chess, and the portrait he painted of maestro Rui Massena, inspired by piano melodies and the legacy of Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Gus Romano 9/16/25 Gus Romano 9/16/25

Fado and the Face of Resilience

Instead of discouraging me, each rejection fuels me to look closer, to understand art in a deeper way. What could feel like an ending becomes a beginning—another chance to paint, to learn, and to grow into the artist I want to be.

Gus Romano 9/14/25 Gus Romano 9/14/25

The First Brush Stroke Is Always the Hardest

The hardest part is never the painting—it’s starting. I wait to feel ‘in the zone,’ but the truth is that I only arrive there once I pick up the brush and make the first stroke.

Gus Romano 9/10/25 Gus Romano 9/10/25

Letter from Lisbon: On Routine, Fear, and Small Beginnings

Some days I feel like I am on a small boat, floating without a compass. I know land is near, but I can’t yet see the shore. I want to begin a new painting, but I don’t know which one, or for what purpose. Still, I know that when I paint, I stop thinking — and that is reason enough not to give up.

Gus Romano 9/4/25 Gus Romano 9/4/25

Beyond Impulse, A Letter on Painting and Patience

In Gerês, I forced a painting out of impulse — and hated it. It was soulless, cheap, a poor imitation. That night Van Gogh reminded me: greatness isn’t born in a rush, but in small, deliberate steps of will. This letter is my attempt to learn patience.

Gus Romano 8/29/25 Gus Romano 8/29/25

Balancing Dreams, Family, and the Reality of Being an Artist

Some days I want to give up, but there’s something inside me that refuses. A voice reminding me that this is what I was meant to fight for.

Letters of Gus Romano

Since July 2025, I have been writing what I call my Letters. They are not essays, nor polished reflections, but fragments of my inner life as an artist — thoughts written in the raw, as if to a friend, like Van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo.

I began these Letters because I realized painting alone cannot hold all that I feel. Sometimes the silence of the studio needs words. In them, I write about doubt, joy, fear, inspiration, exhaustion, and the fragile balance between my work as an artist and my life outside it.

The Letters are dated, imperfect, and deliberately personal. They are not meant to be instructions or manifestos. They are simply traces — records of what it means to search for truth in painting in the 21st century.

Whether anyone reads them now is less important than the fact that they exist. One day, perhaps, they will help explain not only my art, but also the time I lived in, and the questions that guided me.