"I never really thought of myself as an artist"

In 2018, Vlada fractured her spine on a jet ski. The best possible break, as it turned out — one vertebra, no long-term damage, just months at home.

She opened YouTube.

"I'd always drawn. But I could never paint faces. I always wanted to — and suddenly, I had the time."

The first face worked. Then another. She started painting her friends. Everyone was stunned. Why don't you have Instagram? they asked. She made one. Started painting celebrities. Some of them reposted. The first followers arrived.

"My grandmother walked past and said: oh, that's beautiful"

One afternoon Vlada was painting a woman in stockings — the style that would later become her signature. Sensual. Honest. A little vulnerable.

She was nervous. What would they think?

Her grandmother walked past. Then her dad. Then her mum.

All three said the same thing.

She thought: okay then. I'll keep going.

"I still sometimes ask myself — am I really an artist?"

Vlada had a picture in her head of what an artist was supposed to be. Someone who paints constantly. Who bleeds art every hour of the day.

She didn't fit that image. For a long time, she didn't let herself in.

"Now I understand — I am an artist. Precisely because I don't always feel like painting. That's allowed."

Art is the only area of her life that happened by itself. No strategy. No plan. No forcing.

The paintings living at her dad's house

One of her first major commission came from a very famous footballer. Two paintings, paid in full, two months to complete.

She delivered. He stopped responding.

The paintings have been at her parents' house for four years. Her dad — who always said you paint for everyone else, we have nothing on our walls — is finally happy.

"He can collect them whenever he wants. For now they're in our home museum."

London. Spain. Canvas.

"It doesn't matter where I am — if I have something to say, the place is irrelevant."

Her erotic works are about liberation. The freedom most of us quietly crave but rarely allow ourselves. Her portraits go deeper — into the structures we inherit, the identities we question, the selves we are still becoming.

Vlada doesn't explain her work.

She paints it.