This artist creates surreal oil portraits of women surrounded by symbolic animals | Biaani Lopez

At Women in Arts Network, for our Landscape and Places exhibition, we received landscapes from everywhere. Real places. Beautiful places. And then Biaani Lopez Lopez sent us paintings of places that don’t exist on any map and we thought where IS this and why do I feel like I’ve been there.

Biaani is a selected artist for the Landscape and Places exhibition and honestly her paintings are hard to talk about because the thing they do best is the thing words are worst at.

They make you feel something. Before you’ve figured out what you’re looking at the colour has already done something to you. These warm rich oils, glowing from inside, that feel less like paint on canvas and more like someone left a lamp on behind the surface.

She paints women inside surreal landscapes that are really inner worlds made visible. Not real places. Feeling places. The kind of place you’d find if you could walk into a woman’s emotional life and look around. Animals and symbols and impossible colour all sitting together in a way that shouldn’t work but does because feelings don’t follow logic either.

She’s from San Luis Potosí in Mexico and she stayed there while everyone told her to move to Mexico City. She likes the quiet. Needs it actually. She travels, absorbs, comes home and lets everything settle before she paints. Nothing she makes is rushed because nothing she feels is rushed.

She’s been painting women since art school and at some point it stopped being about the figure and became about what the figure is holding inside her. Every painting is a conversation she had with herself first. About colour and emotion and the invisible worlds women carry that nobody thinks to make visible.

Now let’s hear from Biaani, about places that only exist inside women, about staying quiet while the world gets loud, and why the landscape you recognise most in this exhibition might be one you’ve never actually visited.

Q1. Can you share a little about your journey? At what point did painting women become more than just a subject for you when did it start feeling like a way to understand something about yourself?

My journey started when I was an art student, female lines always caught my attention more than male lines, I thought that the subtle changes on contouring and shapes enriched my perception and work more than other elements, I also enjoyed and felt stillness and comfort drawing the curvy lines of women bodies.

Simultaneously self-portraits were always part of my practice since art school, but it was not until I commit myself on producing 20 oil paintings that I connected with inner emotions. On that time, I got into myself, which led me to discover how I process feelings and relate them with colors and symbolism, animals and spirituality. So, every painting that I work on that time, is a conversation I previously had with myself.

Q2. You studied fine arts in San Luis Potosí and you’ve stayed rooted there. In a country where so many artists move to Mexico City, what has that loyalty to your city given your work?

San Luis Potosí has given me the peace I need to create. The rhythm of the city, its calm pace, allows me to feel and reflect. The slower tempo makes me feel that I have more time to perceive sensations and emotions without rush.

Throughout the year I travel frequently, mostly to Mexico City and Oaxaca, where I encounter very different landscapes, atmospheres, and references. When I return home, I carry all of this material with me. In San Luis Potosí I have the time and quiet needed to digest each experience and slowly transform it into part of my creative process.

Q3. You work primarily in oil and describe building paintings in layers over time, guided by intuition and meditation. What does that actually look like day to day do you meditate before you paint, or is the painting itself the meditation?

Now a days painting has become a meditation itself, but in order to be there I had to live the practice and learn about it out of the studio for nearly ten years. Now I am aware that I can make an intention or just become my painting time into a conscious experience which is what mediation is about.

Q4. You say colour is part of your visual language. When you start a painting, do you know the palette before the image, or does the feeling come first and the colour follows?

It depends on the painting, sometimes the actual paint has the name of a color so I explore the different values and the hue scales, and that gives a wide range of color possibilities so I just have to incorporate the shape elements and they both tell the story, but there are other times when I encapsulate a sensation and I work on it, thinking and imagining how to tell the story of that emotion and the color comes together with all the other elements, on my creative process.

Q5. You describe creating surreal environments that reflect inner worlds. How do you decide what a woman’s inner landscape actually looks like what’s real in those scenes and what’s invented?

I have discovered through conversations with girl friends, family and other women I have met, that we all have an inner world very related to our child fantasy worlds. So, on my paintings, is more like living on a fairy tale in which you are the real protagonist of a magic invention, where the scenario is the invention and it is shaped by the real experiences every woman has.

Q6. You teach painting to children, teenagers, adults, and seniors. Has teaching across all those ages changed how you think about your own work?

It definitely has, I connect with the joy of painting when I teach, by observing and leading the variety of creative and technique processes. I feel more confident about my painting subjects and the conversation that I want to create around them, it has opened my mind and I validate my artwork for its uniqueness and personal perception

Q7. The art world loves to talk about “feminine sensibility” in broad terms. What does it actually mean to you not as a concept, but as something you can point to in a specific painting?

It comes to my mind “La creación”, the creation, a painting that I work on when I was hesitating about having children, during the pandemic, the paint is about a woman hugging an egg, At that time, I thought that the gift of creating life was not only about given birth to a child or have a baby on our wound, but is also about hugging every part of the creation and feel as you are part of it.

I was experimenting sadness and a lot of uncertainty, so work on that image gave me comfort. You can feel the emotions that I described on the eyes of the woman painted and feel that eager of connecting, as she hugs the egg.

Q8. What does success look like for you right now is it something you can name, or is it still taking shape?

Q9. You’ve said you want viewers to connect with their own feminine sensibility through your work. When someone reads your painting completely differently from what you intended does that feel like a loss, or does it mean the painting is doing its job?

The painting is definitely doing its job, which is making the viewer meditate, confront the reality and go out of his comfort zone, in order to watch a perspective other than his or hers. I think encouraging people to have their own criteria, opinion, and questioning what is stablish are some of the most important thing’s art gives us.

Q10. What advice would you give to an artist who’s just starting out and still trying to find their own voice?

I would say everything works, every class, every workshop, every art fair, every art exhibition, even every conversation and awareness of what surrounds you, can nurture you own identity. So, take the best of everything, everything works and eventually you will find what works for you. Don’t stop creating and experimenting with every kind of materials.

As our conversation drew to a close with Biaani, we just felt good. That’s it. We felt good. Not intellectually stimulated or artistically challenged or any of the things you’re supposed to feel after talking about art. Just good. Warm. Like we’d been sitting in sunlight for twenty minutes without realising it.

And that’s Biaani. That’s her whole thing. She makes work that makes you feel something gentle and real and you don’t have to work for it. You don’t have to read an essay first or understand the theory behind it. You just stand there and the painting does the rest.

She paints from a quiet city because she chose quiet. She paints slowly because slow is how real feelings move. She paints women’s inner worlds because somebody should and nobody else was. And every choice she makes, from the colour to the pace to the place she lives, all of it points in the same direction. Toward honesty. Toward warmth. Toward the belief that the most important landscapes aren’t out there somewhere. They’re in here. Inside every woman who’s ever felt something she couldn’t explain but knew was true.

For anyone thinking about bringing her work into their home, here’s what we’d honestly say. You know how some art looks great on the wall but doesn’t change how the room feels? Biaani’s work changes how the room feels. You walk in and something’s different. Warmer. Calmer. Like the painting is doing something to the air around it that you can’t explain but your body notices.

And the colours shift depending on the time of day and the light in your space so the painting you see in the morning isn’t quite the painting you see at night and both versions are beautiful. That’s the kind of art you don’t get tired of because it keeps meeting you somewhere new. And honestly in a world that keeps getting colder and faster and more digital, having something on your wall that genuinely makes you feel warm every time you look at it, that’s worth more than most people realise until they have it.

To follow Biaani’s journey and see more of her work, find her through the links below.