About Tasanee

I started painting because I had to.

I'd left an abusive relationship. I was alone, trying to understand myself, learning how to love myself again. In that isolation, I started going inward and what I found there wanted to come out on canvas.

The first paintings were just for me. Then people started standing in front of them and going quiet in a specific way. Not the “admiring something beautiful” quiet. It was the “Recognizing themselves” quiet.

A woman told me she hadn't been able to look at herself in the mirror since her surgery. She stood in front of one of my paintings and cried. A man who grew up in a redlined neighborhood stopped mid-conversation, pointed at one of my pieces, and said, "That's exactly what it felt like." Someone in recovery told me they felt, for the first time, that their story was worth keeping.

That's what I'm painting. Not just what's beautiful. What's true.

My materials are intentional.

I work in layered acrylic on linen, with salt, raffia, and silkworm cocoons pressed into the surface while it's still wet. These aren't decorative choices. Salt fractures and crystallizes as it dries, the same way grief does. Raffia is woven, communal, rooted. Silkworm cocoons are transformation made physical. Every piece carries the evidence of how it was made.

I trained as an architect before I trained as a painter, and that lens never left. I think about how a work changes a room, how the scale hits the body, how the light moves across a textured surface at different hours of the day. I'm not making art to hang on a wall. I'm making work to change the feeling of a space and everyone who moves through it.