Power & Presence: Why I Paint Women at Monumental Scale
- daryasokolova
- May 15
- 2 min read
There is a particular kind of invisibility that happens in rooms designed for men.
I know it well. After leaving Kazakhstan, I built my life across countries where male leadership was the only story being told, where the loudest voices belonged to the people who had never been asked to prove themselves twice. I watched brilliant women work harder, stay later, think sharper, and still walk away with less. I watched their exteriors get noticed first, their intelligence discovered later. Sometimes never.
I painted my way out of that frustration.
Power & Presence is a series of six large-scale female portraits, and the scale is not incidental. When you stand in front of a 120cm canvas and a woman looks back at you at full height, steady, unhurried, unapologetic, something shifts. She is not decorative. She is not waiting. She commands the room the way she should have been allowed to command every room she ever walked into.
The palettes do the same work. Deep burgundy. Emerald green. Regal gold. These are not gentle colours. They are not colours that ask permission to be seen. I chose them deliberately because the women I paint deserve the visual equivalent of what they actually are - essential, powerful, and entirely done with being underestimated.
Each portrait in the series carries its own story. Kate, with her steady gaze and teal garment, embodies the kind of quiet confidence that doesn’t need to announce itself. Julia, set against cobalt blue with bold circular patterns, is strength made graphic. Venus commands the room, green backdrop, red polka dots, with the specific energy of a woman who has stopped explaining herself. Angela holds coastal warmth and rising tide. Two Within explores the duality that most women know intimately: the self that leads, and the self that creates, existing in the same body at the same time.
And then there is Inner Compass, the smallest painting in the series, and in some ways the most personal. Sixty by sixty centimetres. A woman with closed eyes, surrounded by maps she doesn’t follow. I painted her inspired by my first months in Dubai, when I had left everything familiar behind and had nothing to navigate by except a quiet internal voice that kept saying: you’ll be okay.
That painting is the heart of everything I make.
Because what I learned building a life from nothing, no network, no safety net, no blueprint, is that feminine power does not need external validation to be real. It just needs to be seen. Named. Made visible on a wall at a scale that cannot be ignored.
That is what this series is. Not a celebration of struggle, but a correction. A visual argument for what has always been true: women are not supporting characters in somebody else’s story.
These portraits are proof.
Power & Presence is a series of six original paintings, available now. View the full collection:
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