From Boardrooms to Canvas.
I spent three decades in a world built on clarity, speed, and control — where every decision was measured and every minute accounted for. Leadership meant carrying weight with grace, never hesitating, never slowing down. I thrived in environments driven by ambition and logic, yet somewhere between constant motion and polished meetings, I began to lose the sound of my own voice.
In leadership, I lived in masculine energy: decisive, analytical, outward-facing. In art, I met its counterpart — the feminine: intuitive, receptive, inwardly expansive. Neither is superior; both are sacred. I discovered that creation happens where these energies meet. Too much structure makes art rigid; too much flow dissolves it. Painting taught me balance — that strength can exist in stillness, and that sensitivity is another form of wisdom. My practice became a reconciliation of past and present, logic and intuition.
When I finally paused in mid-2024, I heard a silence filled not with emptiness but with possibility. That moment marked my transformation. Leaving the corporate world wasn’t a dramatic leap but a gradual letting go. I tried to bring the same rules with me, but art refused management. Creativity demanded vulnerability and presence.
The first time I touched a blank canvas, colours became my vocabulary and texture my syntax. Each layer expressed what I could not yet say aloud: transformation allows all versions of yourself to coexist. Through my work, I invite others to pause, listen, and make space for the story waiting inside them.
From Concrete to Nature.
When I moved from the cosmopolitan rhythm of Lisbon to the quiet immensity of Serra da Estrela, I exchanged concrete for stone, meetings for silence, performance for presence. It wasn’t an escape — it was a return. Nature became my mentor. Its erosion, textures, and patience reshaped the way I paint. My work began to mirror this shift: layers forming and dissolving like landscapes in metamorphosis. It is not about depicting nature, but embodying its process — creation through transformation.
Art became recovery — not of what I lost, but what I had forgotten. In a world that measures worth through productivity, art slows us down enough to feel again. Through tactile abstraction, I paint to soothe and ground, offering refuge to women who have lived their lives carrying others. My surfaces invite an emotional touch: a pause, a breath, a moment of stillness.
Across my collections — Earth, Raw, Spring 2025, Nr.36St., Blues Breaking Stereotypes, Liberation, Topographies, The Rain Doesn’t Cry — I explore the dual tensions that shape us: order and intuition, structure and freedom, resilience and surrender. These are not contradictions but harmonies in flux. Each collection becomes a threshold, a visual conversation between who I was and who I am becoming — between discipline and release, reason and emotion, concrete geometry and the natural erosion of time.
From Strategy to a Vision Beyond the Canvas.
After years of leading through logic, I now lead through feeling. What was once strategy has become sensibility — a shift from managing outcomes to shaping experiences. My work bridges art and design, translating emotion into tangible presence. Each piece is not an object but an environment: a living surface that interacts with space, light, and memory. Whether placed in a home, hotel, corporate lobby, gallery, or museum, my paintings are conceived as part of the architecture of experience — created to breathe, to hold, to heal, and to transform atmosphere.
For me, art is an atmosphere. Colour, texture, silence, and light form a sensory language that invites people to slow down and reconnect. In a corporate space, my work softens rigidity; in a home, it brings grounding; in wellness spaces, it restores calm; in galleries and museums, it becomes dialogue — between past and present, body and memory. Wherever it exists, it creates presence. And presence, today, is the new luxury.
My vision extends beyond the canvas: art must live with us, not wait for distant validation. It should soften the architecture of modern life and reintroduce tenderness into our environments. I see each painting as an architecture of feeling — a quiet companion shaping how a space is felt, not just how it looks. Through this integration of strategy and intuition, I create living environments where art becomes what it has always been: a human necessity.
From “Authority” to “Experience”.
The art world is undergoing a profound shift — from authority to experience. For centuries, museums, experts, and collectors defined what mattered. But in the 21st century, art is expanding beyond white walls, returning to the rhythm of everyday life. People no longer want to observe art from a distance; they want to live with it, feel it, and let it shape their environments and emotions.
My paintings are created not only for galleries and exhibitions — though galleries remain the most democratic and essential spaces where art can be encountered in its purest form, free from algorithms or intermediaries. My work is also made for the places where real life unfolds: homes, wellness retreats, hotels, offices, galleries, exhibitions that invite touch, presence, and emotional resonance. This is not dilution; it is expansion — art returning to its original purpose of accompanying human life, marking sacred space, and creating connection.
The great artists — Pollock, Mitchell, Bourgeois, Rembrandt, Van Gogh — did not create for institutions. They painted out of necessity, from the inside out. Their canvases were instruments of survival, mirrors for the psyche, expressions of raw emotional truth. Their legacy reminds us that art’s highest purpose is not prestige but presence. Art endures because it helps us feel. It was always meant to live with us.
From Leadership to Art: Female Empowerment.
For three decades in my corporate and entrepreneurial life, my mission was clear: to show women that male-dominated rooms were not barriers but opportunities — spaces where we could lead, grow, and contribute from our full potential. I entered boardrooms where confidence was currency and silence was often misread as weakness. Over time, I learned that true power does not need to imitate the voices around it. Strength lives in presence — in the calm authority that comes from knowing who you are.
Throughout those years, I built teams, mentored women, and cultivated cultures where empathy, intuition, and listening were not liabilities but transformative leadership tools. I witnessed how women lead differently — with emotional intelligence, inclusion, and depth — and how those qualities, when valued, can reshape entire organizations.
When I transitioned from business to art, I realized I wasn’t changing missions — only languages. The purpose that guided my leadership now flows through colour, texture, and matter. Strategy became sensibility; influence became emotion. In leadership I inspired through systems; in art I inspire through atmosphere. Both are languages of connection, rooted in the desire to move others and open possibilities.
Art became a form of embodied leadership. Each brushstroke is a negotiation between decision and surrender, structure and intuition — the same balance I once sought in strategy and management. Through abstraction, I translate resilience, pressure, and transformation into visual form. My work is a reminder of what women already are: capable, powerful, intuitive, and profoundly creative.
“Empowerment Through Art” is not a slogan; it is my lived philosophy. I paint with women in mind — their transitions, their thresholds, their silent strengths. The lines and layers in my work echo the journeys women carry privately: responsibility, expectation, identity, and rebirth. Empowerment, for me, is not confrontation but reconnection — helping women rediscover their own rhythm and inner voice.
This vision extends beyond gender. Anyone seeking balance, authenticity, and presence can find themselves reflected in my work. When a space becomes quieter, warmer, or more human because a painting is present, that is empowerment.
Today, I lead through sensibility rather than strategy. I build environments, not companies — spaces where art and emotion coexist, where the human spirit can rest, reflect, and renew.
My mission continues: to show that art is leadership, beauty is resilience, and creation is empowerment.
From Business Acumen to Expressiveness.
My collections are not created just to decorate but to inhabit. They are environments—living surfaces that ground, soften, and restore. Whether placed in a home, a corporate space, a hotel, or a mountain retreat, each painting is conceived as part of the emotional architecture of a space. My vision is to make art part of how we live, not something distant we merely observe. Every canvas becomes a bridge between two worlds I carry within me: the logic and structure of my corporate past, and the intuition, sensorial depth, and freedom of my artistic present.
Across all my collections, one element remains constant: the language of lines. These lines are not simple marks; they are thresholds. They separate and unite, conceal and reveal. They appear as natural geometries shaped by gravity, as textured ridges of sand and gesso, as written thoughts, or as instinctive scratches cutting through layers of pigment and memory. Some lines echo the structure I once lived by; others open into gesture and flow. They are not boundaries, but living frontiers—the place where opposites meet and a new narrative begins.
This philosophy is embodied in Dual Hirathe, my artistic identity. “Dual” represents the coexistence of logic and intuition, masculine and feminine, discipline and release. “Hirathe” evokes hearth and heart—the intimate origin of creation. Together, they express the emotional architecture beneath every brushstroke. When collectors live with my work, they are not acquiring an image but entering this duality. Each line becomes a mirror, an invitation to inhabit the space between gravity and grace.
Through all my series, from “Raw”, “Earth”, “Spring ’25”, “Improvisations”, “Blues – Breaking Stereotypes”, “Liberation”, “Topographies”, “The Rain Doesn’t Cry”, “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Light as Matter”, this signature remains: duality expressed through the language of lines.
From Emotional Catharsis to Gifts of Being.
“Gifts of Being” marks a pivotal threshold in my artistic and personal evolution — a rite of passage from decades of emotional intensity into a new state of clarity, spaciousness, and presence.
For more than thirty years, my life unfolded inside the pressure of boardrooms, leadership demands, and constant responsibility. As a C-level executive, I navigated layers of expectation while carrying the weight of feminine memories inherited across generations — silent burdens, emotional labor, unspoken resilience. Burnout slowly accumulated within me like sediment. By 2024, it became impossible to ignore. When I began painting in mid-2024, art emerged not as a hobby but as a survival instinct — a channel to release what had been held for too long. My first series were visceral: “Raw”, “Earth”, “Blues”, “Spring”, “Liberation”, “N36St”, “Re-Inventing Pollock”, “Topography of Memories” — each one a cathartic outpouring of intensity. Texture became rupture. Gesture became eruption. Color became confession. These works ( more than 250) held every unspoken emotion buried beneath decades of endurance. Then came the series ( September 2025) - “The Rain Doesn’t Cry”.This collection was the first sign of transition — a subtle internal shift. The tears became rain, the pressure softened, the gesture slowed. What once emerged as emotional discharge began to dissolve into something quieter, more intentional. “The Rain Doesn’t Cry” marked the beginning of my post-catharsis state — not yet fully formed, but awakening.
And from that threshold, “Gifts of Being” began to take shape. In this new phase, creation is no longer an act of urgency but an act of presence. A purification. An inner renewal. A quiet strength. A place that opens. The after of everything. Rupture into clarity. Textures open into transparency; dense layers dissolve into breath and light. Vertical gestures remain — the backbone of my visual language — but they no longer erupt. They expand. They contemplate. They release. The palette shifts into deep blues, luminous whites, and grounded earth tones, reflecting a natural movement from the intimate toward the universal — a movement toward a deeper, liberated inner-self. What once was a cathartic necessity has become an existential offering. This is the first time I feel I am giving something back, not releasing pain, trauma, surpressed emotions, range, anger, but offering light. Painting has become my way of gifting presence — an invitation for the viewer to breathe, pause, feel, and connect.
In 2025, this evolution reaches its public threshold with the debut of Gifts of Being at the international exhibition “Gifts of Art — L’Estetica del Dono,” Milan, from 5th to 19th of December 2025 where the first three works of the new phase — “Rupture Into Clarity”, “A Place That Opens”, and “What I Give Back” — will be presented. Curatorially aligned with the theme of giving, these works reveal a profound transformation: from emotional survival to existential generosity; from rupture to opening; from inner turbulence to shared luminosity. What began as emotional catharsis in 2024 — intensified, raw, and necessary — has matured into “Gifts of Being”: a phase of clarity, spaciousness, and offering.
This is the moment I gave myself to art not as escape, but as presence.
And now, the art becomes a gift in return.
Sonia J.