HOW PAINTING HER NAILS BECAME ONE ARTIST’S WAY OF OVERCOMING PAST TRAUMA
I’ve always been enthusiastic about palms. Not most effective with how they look or what they can achieve, but via how expressive there. We can educate our faces to seem cool and gathered, but a sweaty palm or a clenched fist can deliver your recreation away. As a nail artist, offering people manicures can be an emotional experience: with their hands in yours, your customers lay naked. It’s a beautiful element to present a person. Fresh Set is a common platform where I will provide the whole lot, from technical facts and theories about nails to highlighting those whose lives have been greater using the keratin on our fingertips.
When it comes to nails, Instagram usually is a vortex of image-ideal manicures, so it became a total breath of fresh air to encounter Ana Matheus Abbade, a 22-12 months vintage nail technician from São Paulo, who mechanically documents the journey of her herbal nails. It’s now not uncommon for Ana to publish photos of her snapped nails or her worn polish, a relatable reality for anyone who works with their fingers. Although skilled, there is an outsider first-class to Ana’s paintings that I deeply respect. She has an open, clean mind and often collaborates with the natural features of nails instead of fighting them, working with their herbal wear and tear. I’ve wanted to pay attention to Ana’s story because I started following her. Because of her inventive historical past, I knew she’d have a thrilling theoretical approach to nails. However, I just wasn’t prepared for the attention-watering tale of ways painting, shaping, and growing her nails have become crucial to her existence, as well as a device for constructing herself up from existence-altering trauma.
Ana, I want to begin by saying how a lot I love your nails! What do they look like in the intervening time?
Ana Matheus Abbade:
Our admiration is mutual indeed! My nails are short now – distinct sizes and yellowish, like amber. I am checking out a component I made – an antioxidant nail polish. Even though it appears yellow, the high awareness of vitamin E and essential oil located in Indian cloves could lighten the nail and be a useful resource for the hardening of keratin layers.
When did you turn out to be interested in doing manicures?
Ana Matheus Abbade:
Back in 2015… It turned into an excessive yr of change. I turned into residing in Rio de Janeiro and reading Visual Arts; the whole metropolis was stricken via the preservation of worldwide events such as the World Cup and the Olympic Games. Around the same time, I became bodily and sexually assaulted. After this, I felt the need for my frame to be reborn, and I started through gender transition. I additionally commenced painting my nails, time and again, for numerous days. I might proportion photos of my nails on Instagram with the hashtag: #unhaénavalha (which translates as “the nail is a razor”). A razor is a device for slicing; it could separate one element from any other; it can pierce if need be. I desired to apply my nails as a weapon. At the start, I did not see it as an artistic gesture consistent with se; it changed into something I had to do.
I love your attitude to while your nails wreck and the fact that they may be unapologetically specific lengths, there’s a variety of romance in letting pass and letting them be what they may be.
What is your relationship along with your nails, and the way do you feel once they snap?
Ana Matheus Abbade:
It’s the best evidence that my nails are natural. They ruin. Assumptions are made by way of people who see the image. Did I bite them? Did I bite them? Was it after a few attacks? Showing your damaged nail indicates the start of every other increase. The fact that all are in a specific size marks a moment of each pin in its journey.
You manipulate to create a few positively beautiful and unusual paint outcomes. Are you able to inform me a piece about your experiments and what conjures up you?
Ana Matheus Abbade:
I’m interested in all the one-of-a-kind sculptural and pictorial effects that can be accomplished within a nail cutting. After each carrier, the customer can take their portray away with them. An example of how I do this is to layer the varnish and the pigment in a raw form, then lightly use remover to reveal the layers.