There is a room in Tbilisi that Elene Bokeria has never really left. She was small then, an only child in a household run by grandparents while her mother worked, and the room was quiet in the way that only children's rooms are quiet. She would put music on, pull out her paints, and begin. When she finished a canvas, she would call her family members in. "Mini exhibitions every time I would finish" she says. That ritual, the making and then the showing, the private world briefly opened, has never stopped being the engine of everything.

She is 26 now and living in Barcelona, a full-time painter working in oils, and the scale of the audience has changed. The logic has not.

Elene came to Barcelona in 2018 to study fashion and luxury management, a compromise she negotiated with herself. Art school was the dream, but art school abroad was a financial risk her family could not absorb. Business school had, at least, the right kinds of people in the classes. "I thought, okay, I'll study business as my parents want, but at least I will have cool kids who are interested in fashion." She laughs telling it. The logic of an 18-year-old who already knew what she wanted and was finding the least damaging detour around the obstacle.

She never stopped painting through those years. She is extrovert and social, she says, but she is equally capable of locking herself away for a full week without speaking to another person. The tension between those two modes is not a contradiction. It is the condition of the work. "As artists, we need to live in order to create and tell our stories afterwards." If she does not go out and hear her friend's love story, or the heartbreak, or the strange texture of someone else's night, she cannot paint it. The canvases need raw material.

Her first complete collection grew from exactly this. The Zodiac series, one painting for each sign, each dedicated to a real person in her life. Scorpio was the man she loved who did not love her back. Virgo was her mother, missed across the distance of a new country. Pisces was her grandmother. "Even when I was locked in and was painting them, each one of them was about a certain person." The collection sold almost entirely. Eight pieces gone. 

After the Zodiacs, she spent three years in corporate life, deliberate and focused. She had set herself a goal: financial stability, an apartment in Barcelona, and then the full-time leap. "I made myself a goal to be as optimized with what I've learned and my degree, have a very good corporate job, give myself enough financial stability to be a full-time painter." She is methodical in this way, precise about her own needs in a manner that does not feel calculated so much as honest. She knows what she requires in order to function, and she builds toward it.

Last August, she quit and became a full-time artist. She expected relief. She expected the floodgates. What came instead was a peculiar kind of paralysis. "I remember joking to my friends, imagine I will lose my creativity when this happens. That would be so funny. And imagine that actually happened." It did, partly. The survival mode she had lived inside for years, work, commute, paint until eleven, sleep, repeat, had been generating pressure she had not recognized as productive. Without it, she found herself adrift in her own freedom. "Too much liberty also relaxes you too much sometimes. I found myself understanding that maybe I need to have a little bit of challenge. Maybe I need to have a part-time job that makes me miss my studio so much that I can't wait to finish it so I can go back."

The solution arrived through friendship. Oscar Tusquets is a Catalan architect, painter, designer, and writer who collaborated with Salvador Dalí when Dalí was old and Tusquets was roughly the age Elene is now. They met through exhibitions five years ago, when her Spanish was still uncertain, and formed a bond that she describes without trying to explain. When she needed structure, she texted him. He needed someone to digitalize his studio archive, a library of magazines going back to the 1960s, to be scanned and sorted and catalogued. "He was like, this is so boring, maybe you want it." She wanted it immediately. "I was like, this is amazing. I would learn so much."

Eight hours a week in his studio. But those eight hours come home with her. "I come home and they give me 200 hours of creativity." The encounters with his archive, with his way of inhabiting a life where the work and the person are so fused as to be indistinguishable, confirmed something she had been trying to articulate about her own practice. Tusquets lists himself on his website as designer, painter, writer, architect. Multiple things, simultaneously, without apology. 

The writing began the same way, quietly and then publicly. She has kept diaries since she was seven years old, since 2007. "Probably I have 60 at this point." The newsletters she now publishes came out of the archive work, out of encountering too much to keep inside. But she needed a reason to go public, and Tusquets provided it. The essays are about him, about the archive, about what she is learning there. "I gave myself permission to go public because now it's not only about me, it's about him also. So I was like, okay, maybe this way it won't be too arrogant."

She paints on oil, in a home studio she set up after leaving a shared workspace. The external studio had its uses, introduced her to other artists, gave her the experience of separating home from work. But the dynamic felt too close to the corporate life she had left. She would arrive in the morning and leave at the end of the day and the rhythm was wrong. Now she works in the mornings and starts painting at three and paints until eleven, until she falls asleep, and goes directly to bed. "I like to keep my professional and personal Instagram together. I like to have my home and art together because I can choose the way I want to live my life."

She is self-taught. She paints things she technically does not know how to paint, working by feel, adjusting ratios the way you adjust seasoning when you are making a dish for the first time and the recipe is approximate. When it is flowing, she knows. "It's like a bit of meditative state." When there is doubt, when the Spanish word miedo surfaces in her mind, she stops. "That means I shouldn't force myself." She has a gym mentality about showing up regardless, but she also trusts the signal.

Most of her work is commissioned. She takes a long time with each piece, two or three a year, and they are typically pre-sold before she finishes them. The commissions are not reproductions. Clients come to her with their stories, and she translates those stories into her visual language, which runs through Egyptian mythology, Roman mythology, Asian symbolism, the iconography she has spent years reading and collecting. A client who was always transforming became a phoenix. An insect scientist became a carpenter bee, painted in her full palette, vivid and specific. She tells each client's story back to them in a language only she speaks. "When they have guests and they explain, oh, this is the painting I commissioned, it is about me going through this experience, it becomes like a mutual story."

She represents herself. Two galleries offered deals. She declined both, not from stubbornness, but from a clear-eyed read of what was actually happening. "How I tell the story, the passion and love I have for the painting, no gallerist was able to transmit it so far." If she ever meets one who can, she will consider it. Until then, she goes to the events, talks to the collectors, and enjoys the part of the life that puts her in rooms with people who love art. A friend once described the choice as the difference between a Michelin-starred restaurant hidden from Google Maps and a chain with someone outside pulling you in off the street. "It's okay if you are a bit hidden, really know what you are doing."

Something shifted this past year, and she names it plainly. She had always painted from sadness. Drama, breakups, loss, those had been the reliable fuel. Her aunt warned her early: be careful, you might put yourself into situations on purpose just to have something to paint. Then she found stability, a good relationship, a life that felt, finally, settled. And the creative blocks came. "I remember being scared. Like, do I really need to be sad in order to paint?"

St. Jordi, 2026 - The Horse as a Symbol Between Nation and Self” Oil on linen, 100 × 130 cm

The horse painting is the answer she made with her hands. It is a painting of Saint George's horse, Saint Jordi, patron saint of both Georgia and Catalonia, the two places that have made her. It is framed in tulips, which in Persian culture signify self-love. It is large and it is blue and it is grateful. "This year when I made most of the plans on my mind, I was like, now my main plan is to be kind to my body, paint more, find creativity through happiness. This painting is testimonial."

She wants to make an exhibition next year. She needs ten paintings minimum, has four so far. Even if they sell before the opening, she wants the room, she wants the people who made the effort to leave their houses and come look. "It's like a big birthday." She is building toward it the way she has built toward everything, with a clear picture of what it will feel like when it arrives, and the patience to let the work take the time it takes.

She has learned this year to protect her energy. Putting an invisible, intangible thought on a huge canvas and letting thousands of people see it makes you vulnerable in ways that take time to understand. "You become very vulnerable in front of a lot of people who might put you up to judgment." She used to want every opinion, every critique, every piece of attention. Now she knows that too many opinions is not too necessary. She can share the work and still hold something back. The distance is not coldness. It is craft.

"All this complicated background will make you more unique" she says, to anyone who thinks their particular history disqualifies them from starting. The corporate years, the compromise, the detour, none of it was wasted. It went into the paintings. It went into the knowledge. It went into the person who shows up at the canvas at three in the afternoon and paints until she falls asleep.

She could not have stopped herself. That is the most honest thing she says about any of it. The voices that told her to stop, go to business school, you don't have enough knowledge, this is not for you, could not reach the part of her that was already painting. "I just couldn't stop myself of not expressing."

She still cannot.

Written and published by our legendary Chief of Publications Pauline Garcin.