Every Painting Deserves Its Birthday
- Drica Lobo
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Hey, hello there, friend!
My biggest Birthday Sale is officially here, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I offered such special pricing on my original art. Once you read why I decided to do it, I think it will all make sense.
If you can’t wait to see the sale, you can go straight to the collection here, but promise me you’ll come back and read the story after, because the meaning behind all of this deserves more than a place on the sidelines.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you probably know that I usually sit down on Wednesday night to write whatever has been occupying my mind that week, but yesterday I intentionally stayed quiet. I was putting something together that I wasn’t quite ready to reveal yet, and writing about anything else would have felt almost impossible without spoiling the surprise. So this week’s blog is arriving a little later than usual, because apparently gathering ten years of your artistic life into one place takes a little longer than expected.
My birthday is August 29, and every year when August comes around, I naturally become more reflective about where I have been, what I have created, how much has changed, and especially what might be waiting for me next. This year, that reflection led me straight into my studio, where I started pulling out paintings from different periods of my career until suddenly I had work in front of me spanning an entire decade (wait, what? A DECADE!).
And that's when I realized I wasn't looking at inventory at all. I was looking at ten years of becoming.
I Also Realized How Prolific I've Been
Seeing so many paintings together could easily give the impression that I have an enormous amount of work sitting around, but going back through the years made me realize almost the opposite: I have created an extraordinary amount of art.
In 2017 alone, I painted 95 paintings, and only seven of them are still available today. For many years, creating somewhere around 100 paintings wasn't unusual for me, while other years had completely different rhythms; 2022, for example, was probably one of the years when I painted the least.
That was fascinating to recognize because we tend to measure our creative lives by what is still sitting in front of us, while forgetting everything that has already moved through our hands and into the world. Hundreds of my paintings have found collectors, been commissioned, gifted, exhibited, licensed, reproduced, or simply become part of a chapter that is no longer physically around me. I fell so blessed ;)
So these 23 works aren't evidence of paintings that didn't go anywhere. They are survivors of an enormous body of work.
And when I look at them chronologically, I can see everything changing. I can see the early versions of wave patterns that would eventually become part of my visual language, colors I used heavily and barely touch today, my first experiments with scale and abstraction, the discovery of Flow, and the gradual moment when I stopped trying to rationalize every mark and began trusting intuition more.
Sometimes you have to look backward to understand just how far you've traveled.
Paintings Have Always Felt Like Fragments of Me
I've always seen my paintings as fragments of myself, not because every painting tells a literal story about my life, but because every one of them carries evidence of who I was when I created it. They hold what fascinated me, what I was questioning, what colors I couldn't stop using, what I was afraid to try, what I had finally given myself permission to explore, and ultimately what kind of artist and human I was becoming.
Some have traveled with me for years, living on my own walls or moving between exhibitions and my studio, and something feels different now because I genuinely feel ready for them to go.
Their price is changing. Their value isn't. My intention is to see these paintings leaving my studio because I want them to find loving places where they can actually be lived with, while allowing me to create physical and creative space for whatever my next season wants to become.
The Birthday Retrospective: 2016–2026
That realization became The Birthday Retrospective, bringing together 23 original works created between 2016 and 2026 for only ten days. The number 23 feels particularly special because it also represents the number of years I have lived in the United States (HALF OF MY LIFE), and together these works allow you to see very different chapters of my artistic practice sitting beside one another.
Instead of applying one blanket discount, I looked at each work individually and created a special Birthday price for it, with some reductions smaller and others considerably larger.
Those prices aren't a reflection of which paintings I consider more or less valuable; they are simply an invitation to help these works move out of my studio and into homes where the next part of their stories can begin.
On August 29, the entire Birthday Retrospective will disappear from my website, along with its special pricing, as I intentionally create space for whatever comes next.
And because every painting deserves its birthday, anyone who collects an original during the retrospective will also receive the first three months of my new Snail Mail Experiment, where I'll be sending a little piece of my creative world through the actual mail each month with art, a note from me, and one little surprise inspired by my endless obsession with curiosity. If you refer a friend who collects an original, you and your friend will both receive those three months as my gift.
Making Space for What's Next
Birthdays are strange and beautiful markers because technically nothing changes between the night before and the morning after, yet they give us an opportunity to look backward at how far we've traveled before turning toward the horizon again.
These 23 works are fragments of the artist I have spent the last decade becoming, and perhaps the most meaningful birthday gift I could receive this year isn't adding something else to my life at all, but watching some of these fragments leave my hands, find loving places to belong, and create space for whatever comes next.
23 original works. 10 years of becoming. 10 days to collect a piece of the story.
The Birthday Retrospective disappears August 29.
I hope you find your match!
Color Your Life!
Drica
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