This Lithuanian Artist Paints Faces That Glow From Within ┃Lauryna Rakauskaitė

At Women in Arts Network, we notice when an artist’s work makes us feel something we weren’t expecting. For Faces, we expected intensity. Weight. Confrontation. The heavy emotional lift that portraiture often demands.

Lauryna Rakauskaitė gave us something else entirely. She gave us light.

Lauryna is a selected artist for the Faces exhibition and her paintings do something that sounds simple but is incredibly hard to pull off. They make you feel good. Not in a shallow way. In the deep way. The way you feel when you look at someone you love and they’re not performing anything for you, they’re just existing peacefully and that peace radiates outward and touches everything near it. That’s what her faces do. They radiate.

She paints with warmth. Warm colour, warm gesture, warm space. Her compositions are open and uncluttered, giving the figure room to breathe and giving the viewer room to feel whatever they need to feel without being directed.

The palette glows from within, colours that seem lit from behind the canvas. And her figures sit in this beautiful stillness that isn’t absence, it’s presence. The quiet kind. The kind that only shows up when someone has stopped trying to be seen and is just being.

She doesn’t force emotion. She creates space for it. The gestures in her work are subtle, quiet, almost still. Nothing dramatic. Nothing performative. And somehow that restraint carries more feeling than drama ever could.

She wants her paintings to inspire laughter and tenderness and reflection and she achieves all three by doing the hardest thing an artist can do, getting out of the way and letting the painting speak for itself.

Lauryna has been creative since childhood but she spent over a decade doing something else entirely, leading a team, building a career, living the practical life. Two years ago she came back to painting because she couldn’t not come back.

Her words are simple and they say everything. It feels like something I can no longer keep inside. That’s not someone returning to a hobby. That’s someone returning to themselves.

She’s at an exciting point in her practice. Starting from portraits, now moving into gesture, into environment, into space and detail. Everything feels open. Everything feels possible. There’s a freshness to where she is right now that you can feel in the work itself, this sense of an artist discovering what she’s capable of in real time.

Now let’s hear from Lauryna, about a decade away from painting and the pull that brought her back, about stillness and glow and the faces that carry both, about making space on canvas for the emotions people forgot they had, and why the gentlest work in this exhibition might be the one that stays with you longest.

Q1. Could you share your background and how your artistic path evolved into painting what led you to fully embrace painting as your voice after years of creativity on the side?

Since childhood, I have been drawn to drawing, painting, and creating, but I spent more than ten years leading a team. Over the past two years, I have returned to painting intensively, as it is what my heart truly desires. It feels like something I can no longer keep inside.

Q2. Many of your works explore quiet presence and internal states. How do you think about translating inner life or emotional stillness into visual form on canvas?  

I believe that when you listen to your inner voice and work from the heart, a sense of stillness naturally finds its way onto the canvas. I allow space, color, and quiet gestures to carry inner states. Trusting this intuitive process helps me translate inner life into visual form.

Q3. You talk about time dissolving when you paint. How do you think that sense of immersion influences the rhythm and layering you build into your surfaces?

It’s difficult to explain. I simply let everything happen as it comes naturally to me.

Q4. You’ve said your art aims to inspire laughter, tenderness, and reflection. How do you approach those qualities formally through gesture, motif, or colour without directing the viewer’s emotions?

I want my work to evoke emotions—laughter, tenderness, reflection. I approach this through gestures, motifs, and color in ways that feel natural and open. I try not to force a specific feeling, but rather to create spaces in the painting where the viewer’s own experience and imagination can bring these emotions to life.

Q5. When you look at a painting you’ve worked on over weeks or months, what signals to you that it has reached its final state?

I just get the feeling that everything is complete, that I have nothing more to add. Of course, it always seems like you could continue and make it better, but then an inner response tells me that it’s already done. Perhaps it will be different with the next painting.

Q6. What parts of your practice feel most open or unfinished right now in terms of theme, technique, or scale?

I want to express emotions in as many different ways as possible. I started with portraits, and now I aim to explore hand gestures or other simple elements, but not in a literal way. I would also like to pay more attention to the environment and details, perhaps incorporating a sense of place and space.

Q7. The piece Beginning reflects on the idea of daring to start. How does the notion of beginnings whether artistic or personal guide your process when you begin a new painting

It’s both exciting and intimidating to start a new piece. It feels like you have to let go of the one you’ve been working on, sometimes for several months. And there’s always the question of whether it will succeed.

Q8. What kind of connection do you hope forms between the viewer and the figures or spaces in your paintings?

I really hope that viewers are inspired by positive emotions, that they remember what makes them happy, smile, and enjoy the experience. It feels like there is so much negativity around, so I want to share goodness, beauty, love, and light. For my paintings, I like clean, empty, and spacious environments, giving enough room for the work itself and the possibility to step outside and enjoy nature.

Q9. What advice would you give to artists who want to paint work that feels intimate but also speaks to shared experience?

I believe that everyone should listen to their heart and follow the path of their soul, doing what they truly desire. I would encourage taking time for silence and learning to hear oneself.

As we concluded our conversation with Lauryna, we realised she’d reminded us of something we needed to hear. That art doesn’t always have to be heavy to be meaningful. That a painting can hold tenderness and still hold truth. That making someone smile is not a lesser goal than making someone cry.

Because somewhere along the way the art world decided that serious means dark. That depth requires weight. That if your work doesn’t challenge or confront or unsettle then it isn’t doing enough. And Lauryna’s entire practice quietly pushes back against that. She paints faces that glow. She fills canvases with warmth and light and space and stillness.

And the impact of standing in front of one of her paintings isn’t less than standing in front of something heavy. It’s different. It’s the kind of impact that doesn’t hit you in the chest. It settles somewhere softer. Somewhere you didn’t know was tired until it finally got to rest.

And then there’s her story. A woman who spent more than ten years doing something else, something practical, something responsible, keeping the creative part of herself tucked away because that’s what life demanded. And then one day she couldn’t keep it inside anymore.

That sentence alone should mean something to every person reading this who’s been pushing their own thing to the side. The thing your hands want to do. The thing that makes time disappear. The thing you keep telling yourself you’ll get back to eventually.

Lauryna got back to it. After a decade. And what’s pouring out of her now has the kind of energy that only comes from someone who waited too long and knows it and isn’t going to waste another minute.

If her journey teaches us anything it’s that it’s never too late to return to the thing that was always yours. And that sometimes the world doesn’t need more darkness from its artists. Sometimes it needs someone brave enough to paint the light.

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