The Confidence I Didn’t Know I Had
Letters Gus Romano Letters Gus Romano

The Confidence I Didn’t Know I Had

A new year begins slowly, from bed, between sickness and reflection. While finishing a demanding project, I discover something unexpected: that my intuition is not accidental, and that a new stage in my painting may already be forming.

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Not Finished Yet
Letters Gus Romano Letters Gus Romano

Not Finished Yet

Vogue is out, and my work lives inside its pages. What follows is not celebration, but a quiet reckoning with exposure, doubt, and the responsibility of turning creation into something that can exist beyond the studio.

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The Day Before the Pages Open
Letters Gus Romano Letters Gus Romano

The Day Before the Pages Open

On the eve of a publication that changed my life, winter arrives with its cold, slow light. While the world prepares to turn the page, I sit with the strange mix of joy, fear, and quiet pride that comes after creating seven portraits that carry pieces of my past and my dream.

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The Glass Just Broke
Letters Gus Romano Letters Gus Romano

The Glass Just Broke

A letter written on my thirty-second birthday, after the most intense project of my life. Glass broke, sleep vanished, doubt tried to win — but dedication stayed.

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The Weekend That Felt Like Home
Letters Gus Romano Letters Gus Romano

The Weekend That Felt Like Home

During a family reunion in Alentejo, we found the old letters my grandfather once wrote to my grandmother — handwritten words that stopped time. In them, I saw the same desire I feel when I paint or write: to leave behind something that lasts. Between laughter, sketches, and memories, I understood that home is not just a place — it’s what we continue to create together.

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Letter from Lisbon: On Routine, Fear, and Small Beginnings
Letters Gus Romano Letters Gus Romano

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.

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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.