Dear creative Reader

I want to start by apologizing for my absence over the past month. I was away on a work trip to Slovenia, which, fortunately, I managed to extend into a few days of holiday in Vienna. It turned into one of those trips that stays with you, especially if you love art as much as I do.

During my time there, I visited some of the city’s most iconic museums, and what struck me most was how each one stirred something different in me. A distinct creative response that I felt drawn to translate into my own journal pages, in my own way.

Where Art Met My Journal Pages

At the Belvedere Palace, I spent a long time with the works of Gustav Klimt. His paintings deeply impressed me—not just for their beauty, but for the way they balance figurative elements with incredibly rich, ornamental detail. There’s something almost meditative in how the patterns wrap around the human form, as if emotion itself could be gilded, layered, and held in place.

For my flower journal, this translated into an invitation to treat flowers as both subject and ornament. Instead of simply drawing a bloom, I want to let it expand. Repeating its shapes, echoing its curves, and surrounding it with patterns inspired by its structure. You might try choosing a single flower and building a page where it appears both realistically and as a decorative motif, almost dissolving into abstraction.

Then, at the Leopold Museum, I encountered the work of Egon Schiele. The experience was entirely different. His distorted, expressive bodies carry an intensity that feels raw and unfiltered. I found myself drawn to the emotional honesty in his lines. The way the body becomes a vessel for tension, vulnerability, and something almost uncomfortable, yet deeply human.

In my journal, this becomes an exploration of imperfect, expressive lines. Instead of carefully rendering flowers, I want to draw them quickly, letting the lines feel slightly off, elongated, or even fragmented. What happens if a stem bends too sharply, or petals feel almost restless? This approach shifts the focus from beauty to emotion, letting the flower express a feeling rather than just a form.

Finally, at the Albertina, I came face to face with Sleeping Women with Flowers by Marc Chagall. A piece that already lives with me differently, as I have a poster of it at home. Seeing it in person was unexpectedly moving. Its dreamlike, floating composition felt even more delicate and poetic than I had imagined. What impacted me most was the symbolic way he explores flowers, not as simple decorative elements, but as carriers of emotion, memory, and quiet storytelling.

This left me wanting to explore flowers as symbols within a scene. Instead of isolating a flower, I imagine placing it in a small, dreamlike composition — floating beside a figure, resting in an unexpected place, or appearing larger than life. You could create a page where the flower represents a feeling, a memory, or even a person, letting it interact with other elements in a soft, almost surreal way.

To bring all of this to life, I recorded the process of creating these pages, capturing how these influences slowly translated from museum impressions into marks, shapes, and compositions in my journal. It became a way of extending the experience, and of reflecting more deeply on how inspiration transforms as we begin to create.

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Looking back, these three experiences almost feel like a conversation: Klimt’s ornamental richness, Schiele’s emotional intensity, and Chagall’s poetic symbolism. Each one opened a different door creatively, reminding me that there isn’t a single way to express what we feel, only different languages waiting to be explored.

I’m returning from this trip with a full journal, a mind buzzing with ideas, and a renewed desire to experiment—especially with how I use flowers—not just as subjects, but as storytellers.

Thank you for being here, even when I go quiet for a little while.