‘Looking down the troposphere’ is an on-going oil painting series which explores 3 different natural states of the sky: transformation, transition and transparency. Taking inspiration from the book ‘My way, the way of the white clouds’ (1975) by Osho, since 2018, Tia has started to observe the interactions between sunlight, wind and clouds, that as a result cause physical formations and colours of the sky. She considers herself as a cloud, projecting her inner feelings onto their shapes, which adapt with the wind. No beginning, no end.
The paintings are Tia’s travel diary, written from an unusual perspective from an airplane's window looking down to the troposphere. This point of view reflects her life over the past 2 years, spending most of her time travelling alone, crossing geographical boundaries of vast lands between Vietnam - Europe. The lands where the East and the West collide, merging into and redefining one another.
In her paintings, the metaphorical use of colours in relation to emotions is fundamental narratives. Meanwhile, interestingly, her technique gives a knowing nod to both nineteenth-century French realism and twentieth-century abstraction while depicting such almost surreal scenes.
