Rachel Silva shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Rachel, really appreciate you sharing your stories and insights with us. The world would have so much more understanding and empathy if we all were a bit more open about our stories and how they have helped shaped our journey and worldview. Let’s jump in with a fun one: What makes you lose track of time—and find yourself again?
I lose track of time when my hands are in the paint and the music is shaking the walls. The clock dissolves, and I slip straight into the rhythm of color and texture. Hours fall away, the outside world fades, and I find myself again in that moment when the canvas shows me something I couldn’t put into words.
What comes back isn’t just a painting, it’s proof that I’m still here, still creating, still alive in the chaos of it all.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Rachel Silva, a self-taught abstract artist. I paint like I breathe: instinctively, urgently, without a map.
My style is abstract expressionism with grit, built on thick textures, fractured layers, and music pulsing through every stroke. I use my hands as much as any tool because the paint needs to be felt, not just placed. What begins as chaos often softens into something that feels like release.
I’ve been painting for six years, and in that time my work has shifted and grown, but the heartbeat of it remains the same. My art has traveled farther than I ever imagined, yet it always begins in the same place: the need to create what words cannot hold. For me, it’s about turning grief into something alive, rage into something beautiful, and silence into color.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
Before the world had its opinions, I was a kid with my nose always in a book. Reading gave me a way to question everything and imagine more than what was in front of me.
I wrote constantly, building stories, spilling poems, chasing ideas that felt bigger than me. Writing was my first passion, and it still is, but painting has become the mirror of that love. What I once tried to capture in sentences, I now drag across canvas with texture and color.
My imagination has always been the loudest voice in the room, and I refuse to silence it just because the world says to fall in line.
If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
Great question!
I’d tell her she’s not wrong for feeling everything so much. Her heart, the one she got from her mom, is her anchor and her compass.
I’d tell her to keep writing, keep creating, and not to shrink when the world tells her she’s too much. Her imagination is not an escape, it’s a gift. The notebooks, the stories, the worlds she disappears into are not distractions but doorways.
One day she will see that her tenderness is actually power, that her creativity is her strength, and that it is the very thing that makes her unbreakable.
I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
That tenderness is power. The world teaches us to equate strength with hardness, with walls and armor. But I have learned the opposite. The ability to stay open, to feel deeply, to create from that rawness, is the bravest thing we can do. Chaos on a canvas, vulnerability in a conversation, grief turned into color: those are the places where real strength lives. Not everyone sees it that way, but I have staked my life and my art on it.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: What is the story you hope people tell about you when you’re gone?
I hope the story people tell about me is not that I had it all figured out, but that I lived wide open. That I created without asking permission, that I let the chaos and the beauty bleed into the same canvas. I want them to say my art made them feel something real, that it cracked open a part of them they thought was sealed shut.
I hope they remember me as someone who kept choosing honesty over comfort, who carried her scars like ink on skin, and who believed that tenderness could be as fierce as fire.
If my story is told, let it be this: she burned bright, she made noise with color, and she never stopped turning her heart into something alive.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rs_artstuff
Image Credits
Studio photo: Whispering Willow Photography
