Traffic

Traffic, oil on canvas painting

Today is international sex workers' day so I decided to entitle this painting "Traffic". The painting is about young girls being trafficked, raped and forced into prostitution after they've been lied about well paid jobs and they've fell  into the trap. Most of them come from poor families in the villages in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and other countries in the Eastern Europe where there are no jobs and no opportunities, have no access to education and information, are very young and can be easily tricked be cause they don't even know what is behind the beautiful stories about good jobs abroad and happy lives out of poverty. They thing they will work as model, waitress, baby sitter, dancer, massage therapist or anything else except the cruel reality of prostitution and when they get there they realiase they've become sex slaves. They are raped, beaten, not allowed to leave and even killed if they refuse to practice prostitution. They are blamed by society be cause most people don't know they are FORCED to do this, in the first stage by the poverty, them by the pimps who, pretending they will take them out of the nightmare of poverty, offering them a better life, take advantage of the situation and turn them into sex slaves. Some of them raise their kids alone, some have no family, being orphaned from the start and all of them have one thing in common: the extreme poverty and the lack of perspectives.

Prostitutes on the street

They sell their bodies on the streets. Poverty and the lack of perspectives forces them to do it. Some of them have no family, some are single moms with little kids, some of them are teenage girls who had no acces to education and instead of going to school they are on the streets, hooking. Most of them come from extremely poor families in the villages in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine or other countries in the eastern Europe. They've been brought here by criminals who have promised them good jobs and a better future, then they raped them and forced them into prostitution The have no other option. They are just sex slaves.
This is my painting about the girls who practice prostitution on the the streets.

Me and Sappho

Watching my painting about Sappho and the girl who had to leave her and the island of Lesbos I wish it was me next to this Sappho

Reincarnation

The baby, coming to Earth from the cosmic portal of the spirits, acrylics on canvas painting

Promisses, then and now

Promises oil on canvas painting

12 years ago I've made the ball point pen drawing below. I was just a teenager dreaming about the love she was not allowed to have. I've made this imagining it's only me and her next to the sea. The city with it's people is far away and it's just the two of us. She, the blond woman with short hair in the right, is giving me a flower, the flower of love, promising me she will love me forever. Blue butterflies fly around us and dolphins play in the sea water.

Now, after so many years, I've made an oil on canvas painting about this teenage dream story 

The life of a lesbian in Romania

Sometimes I feel so lonely and sad and all I need is love, the love I am not allowed to have here in Romania, here in this God damn country where the retrograd orthodox church is governing our lives next to the corupt politicians who should all be in prison not in the parlament and now they want to make a homophobic constitution and two women cannot be together be cause here women are not really independent. Here a woman's succes depends on the men she has relationships with, not on her work. I have a lot of female friends who don't even have a job and all the successful women I know have men behind them, business men or men with important jobs. I've never meet a business woman or a woman with a well paid who is a lesbian or a single woman.

Do you know why? Be cause they have no chance in this fucking society, be cause they are discriminated all the time, be cause there are a lot of companies where the boss fires women who don't want to sleep with him. I know from my own experience. I've never liked boys and I've never had a boyfriend and I work hard just to keep myself on the lowest survival line and pay my bills and for other women like me it's even harder. I've had a girlfriend who was in a desperate situation. She has lost her job and her family was not accepting her and she had nothing, and that's what happens to most of us. We loose our jobs or we can never find a job and our homophobic relatives don't accept as as we are and that's why we can never have relationships. We have no place that is ours, nothing and to be together we must pay the price of loosing everything and remaining on the streets with no job, no money, no house, nothing. We work hard and we can never have our own house from our own work, we cannot even rent a flat to live together. We loose our jobs or we can never find a job and our homophobic relatives don't accept as as we are and that's why we can never have relationships There is an economical discrimination of women here in Romania, not only lesbians, all the women who don't have influent boyfriends or husbands.

A painting about two girls who try to stay together in a hostile world, on a n unstable ground, so fragile, so vulnerable

I've made all of these drawings and paintings in my lonely and sad moments when I could only dream about the love I cannot have. I can only paint imagining I am next to the woman I love, that's all I can do, living alone in this intolerant society.

The tree of love

The tree of love, a painting I've made using only coffee and sugar