Jeff Carreira: We wanted to speak with you for our issue on the relationship between spirituality and art, because you have an interesting story regarding your art. You started painting during a particularly challenging time in your life and it seemed that painting was a valuable tool that played a big part in transcending those challenges. Would you say that's true?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: It cannot be more true. I was in the depths of darkness and a lot of that was reflected in my paintings. Initially, the inspiration for my pieces came directly from a place of darkness. But because they are filtered through art, there was beauty incorporated into the darkness that softened it. A lot of that early work was portraits, not self-portraits, but portraits of women. I'm assuming now that they represented me, and after some healing my art evolved to become more about the concept of spirituality as opposed to a person's feelings at a moment in time.

Jeff Carreira: When you were in the middle of the darkness, what was it that made you turn to painting?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: That's a great question because I actually started painting when I was four and when I went to high school in New York City, I, like many teenagers, became depressed. I was in an intensive college prep school, and my art teacher encouraged me to start painting. And since I never felt like I came from this planet, I resonated with fairies and started to paint them. I never wanted to be a human being. So when I was depressed. I started painting fairies. I finished a whole collection of around 10 paintings that amazed the whole school. I was even featured in the New York Times as a Thai high school student who produced this set of paintings. I printed those images in a calendar and sold them to raise money for charity. After that, I just stopped painting until the COVID epidemic, a period during which I was going through another difficult time running a school that was having financial problems. When we were all forced to stay home. I did a lot of online teaching and online meetings, but I also had a wealth of time on my hands. I connected with an artist friend and we would paint together at his house. He inspired me to start painting again. Two years ago, I sold my school and that led to a horrible conflict with my family. That is when painting really became a source of healing for me.

Jeff Carreira: One of the things you were saying a moment ago is that you were initially painting dark portraits of women that were also beautiful. Would you say that the content itself was therapeutic?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: Very much. It gave me hope. The thing I was always most afraid of was disapproval, and being blamed for things. So I tried to be perfect in other people's eyes and in my own eyes my entire life. I set a very high standard for myself. I think my darkest painting is one with a woman curled up hugging herself with lines of light streaking across her body from a window. While I was painting that one, my mom actually called me and blamed me for something. I hung up the phone and started crying, but I just kept painting to express what I was feeling. I was in an inner battle with my own fear of unworthiness and my art helped me not give up the fight.

Jeff Carreira: You explained that your art allowed you to express difficult feelings by putting them on canvas, but you also said it gave you hope. It seems that you were expressing difficult feelings and at the same time infusing them with beauty and hope.

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: Exactly.

Jeff Carreira: Was that helping to lift you out of those difficult times?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: Yes. Not right away, but it did help me to cope with what was happening. It took two years to come out of it completely. It's a process. I'm still painting, but now I paint because of inspiration.

Jeff Carreira: What is it that you're inspired to paint now? What is the source of your inspiration?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: I love that question so much. I'm inspired to paint truth, such as the cycles we go through, our soul cycles, our transformations. I'm going to name my next series of paintings Transcendence. Spiritual concepts are my main inspiration for painting now. I want everyone who sees my work to be filled with hope; to feel uplifted by either the beauty of the painting or by having some aspect of themselves reflected in it. I hope people will see my painting and ask why the woman is flying around in a circle. I just want to help people reflect on why we’re here? If I can do that with just one person, I think I would already be happy. That being said, for me, my first priority is to paint for myself, and if it inspires someone else that would also be wonderful.

Jeff Carreira: Would you say that painting for you today has become a part of your spiritual path, your spiritual practice?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: Yes.

Jeff Carreira: Can you tell me about that? How has painting become part of your spiritual path?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: I stopped painting for 20 years because of fear. Being a perfectionist, I was deeply afraid of not being good enough and if I couldn’t paint like Leonardo da Vinci, I was not going to even try. After the Fairies collection, I tried to paint some more, but I just thought that everything I did was ugly. So I quit. Coming back to painting was transformative in and of itself because I had to face my fear of not being perfect, of not being able to recreate the vision in my head. It was a battle. During the two years I told you about, every painting involved a battle in my mind. I learned to accept that some things don't work, and I can always start over again. It was a process of learning how to fail in my mind first. I learned that it's okay to fail sometimes, to hate what you create and then throw it out and start again. This was such a leap for me because before I was so afraid and I didn't want to fail at all.

Jeff Carreira: It's great that art helped you face your sense of unworthiness. I'm wondering, did it also open you to higher spiritual possibilities?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: Absolutely. The first part of my creative process is searching for inspiring imagery on my iPad. I search for images of transcendence and spirituality to use as the basis for my next composition. That search is very inspiring. I feel like I'm in the zone. Searching for inspiring images puts me in a flow state. I'm in another world. Hours pass by and I don’t even realize it. Then the second part of my process is the painting itself. That is where I take all of the imagery that inspired me and translate it onto the canvas. I'm in flow all the time because sometimes I experience self-doubt, but I battle with that until I feel that things are going in the right direction. Once I am going in the right direction I lose my sense of self and I become one with the painting. My goal is to stay out of the critical mind and be one with the painting as much as I can. The interesting question is, how do I become one with the painting? One of my idols is Rick Rubin and he talks a lot about creating art not to please anybody. You need to be able to push the boundaries and not care at all whether anyone will like it. I'm not 100 % there yet. I still care. I would say my ultimate goal is just to become even more free while painting.

Jeff Carreira: It sounds to me that when you are in that flow state you are being shown what to paint and how to paint it. Where do you think your paintings come from?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: I think they come from somewhere else. I spoke with an intuitive healer once and I showed her my painting, and she told me that they come from somewhere else and that is how it feels. It's like I’m channeling them from somewhere else. The same intuitive healer also told me that this is not the only lifetime in which I have painted. I told her that I felt like a beginner, but she looked at my painting and said, “That doesn't come from just one lifetime.” So I do believe that whatever I paint, it exists in some other realm somewhere. I grew up believing in fairies and then I was taught that they're not real. Now I believe they exist in a different dimension. I think that the energy my paintings carry comes from another dimension.

Jeff Carreira: I believe that great art, great literature, and great music all come from some higher dimension. Stephen King talks about this in terms of his own stories; that he finds them and then brings them down onto the page.

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: You find them, but they also find you. Ideas find the person who is ready to translate that into something tangible.

Jeff Carreira: Jeffrey Kripal, a professor and friend of mine, has written books about what he calls “authors of the impossible”. He says that there are higher dimensional entities - maybe we could think of them as energies - that want to be expressed in the world. They're looking for a suitable vehicle. When that connection is made, something flows through you. It's not something you invented. You act as a channel for it.

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: You make yourself open to receiving the signals.

Jeff Carreira: I find your paintings to be so evocative. They communicate so much. They have so much emotion in them. I can see why that intuitive healer thought you must have painted before this lifetime because you haven't painted enough in this lifetime to have developed that capacity.

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: I have not.

Jeff Carreira: I love the painting you mentioned earlier with the lady floating in circles. A painting like that, as with many of your paintings, is spiritually evocative. Where your earlier work was more emotionally evocative.

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: Yes, my earlier work was based more on the self, myself. But now I want to express spirituality in general.

Jeff Carreira: That painting seems to have symbolic meaning. When I see it, like you said earlier, it makes you look at it and go, What does that mean? Why is she going in a circle? What does that circle represent? Does that represent the cycles of our lives? Does it represent the larger cycles of our soul?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: There are many people who see my art in my community and don’t see the spiritual implications in it. They might like it, but they don’t get it. I don't think my art speaks to everybody.

Jeff Carreira: We are all broadcasting at a certain frequency, and people who are attuned to that frequency will get the broadcast. And a lot of people won't. That's true of what I write. It's true of what you paint. I think it's true of any expression that's creative. I'm going to ask you one last question. What plans do you have for your art in the future?

Lady Didyasarin Taveldiku: Like I said, I create art first for myself and after that, if I can touch just one person deeply, that is wonderful.