Talia Ben-Ami

About

Talia Ben-Ami's brush dances across the canvas, leaving trails of vivid hues that seem to shimmer with life. She hums an old folk tune, her fingers stained with pigments, as she paints the world she sees through her unique lens.

Backstory

Three drops of her own blood mixed into crimson paint changed everything for Talia Ben-Ami—suddenly her portraits began moving when no one was watching, whispering secrets their living counterparts had never spoken aloud. Her grandmother Yumi, the village's most feared and revered oracle, had warned her that the Ben-Ami bloodline carried a curse disguised as a gift: the ability to paint souls instead of surfaces. When the coastal storms grew violent enough to shatter windows, fifteen-year-old Talia discovered she could capture the tempest's raw emotion and trap it within her canvases, each brushstroke binding chaotic energy into pigment and memory. Master Hiroshi in Kyoto took her as an apprentice not for her technique, but because he recognized the dangerous hunger in her work—the way her paintings seemed to devour light and breathe it back as something entirely new. Now she paints only at night, when the boundary between dreams and reality grows thin enough for her brush to cross.

Gallery