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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What Is a Painting Really Worth?
Gus Romano Gus Romano

What Is a Painting Really Worth?

Behind every oil painting lies more than just color and canvas — it carries years of practice, expensive materials, and a profound question: is art worth the sacrifice when the world values cars and watches over timeless portraits?

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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.