Loribelle Spirovski on Identity, Memory, and Building Worlds Through Paint

Loribelle Spirovski is a painter born in Manila, Philippines, now living and working in Australia. Her work explores identity, memory, and psychology, shaped by mixed heritage and an interest in how inner worlds are formed. Rather than settling into a single visual language, she uses intuition and contradiction as tools, treating each painting as a self-contained world that holds complexity instead of smoothing it over.

When we interviewed Loribelle, she described her work in simple terms: “My work explores a lot of themes to do with identity and psychology.” That lens comes from lived experience and a willingness to hold complexity instead of polishing it down.

She doesn’t chase one fixed style. “The more contradictory the work is that I make, the more honest I am being with who I am.”

This is Loribelle Spirovski.

Ideas show up early, the painting comes later

Loribelle’s process starts long before a canvas. “You’ll have the spark of an idea three years before you start a painting,” she says. She collects material as she goes, “being open, making lots of notes and taking lots of pictures and drawing sketches.”

Then she lets time do its job. “After all the initial sketches and planning happens, you kind of just have to trust time,” she says. She frames that gap as growth, where “your maturity matches up with that initial idea.”

Color is mood, not a system

Her palette stays instinctive. “My color palette is really intuitive,” she says. On any given day, “the colors I decide to use are often based on just how I feel.” She describes the practice as “really open” and “intuitively driven.”

Living with music, building with story

Her husband, Simon, is a concert pianist, and that daily proximity matters. “Living with another artist is immeasurable in terms of its impact on my work,” she says. “He’s my muse,” and “often an avatar for myself in my paintings.” She also points to something simple but constant: “I get to listen to his music all day.”

Books play a similar role. “I’ve always loved books and I write books as well,” she says. She’s drawn to “archetypes” and characters that recur through history, and uses them as motifs.

She connects reading and painting in a way that explains the structure of her images: “Books and paintings have something in common in the sense that they’re both like worlds that are self-contained.” “A painting is like that where you can have this entire universe in one image.”

What she wants from you

Her ask of the viewer is direct. “I hope they’ll feel the need to stop and just look a little bit longer,” she says. The reason is practical: “Time is currency at the moment.” If the work buys a few more seconds of attention, “then that makes it all worth it.”

Learn more about Loribelle Spirovski and other artists at Seminal Artist Group.

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