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Fella Cederbaum’s journey as an artist reflects her deep commitment to the pursuit of truth. Her poetry, music, films, and visual art are all expressions of an inner dialogue with life’s big questions — those that never come with easy answers.
Fella’s work connects with the raw essence of human experience. That kind of exploration means to live, feel, and seek understanding. In that every poem she writes is an invitation for others to do the same. Her poetry, written in her very unique questioning style, urge her audience to look inward, question the stories they tell themselves, and explore the belief systems that shape their lives.
All of Fella’s artistic expressions are spontaneous and not geared to serve as entertainment, but rather to inspire a journey into the unknown. Works like The Door and The Great Offense are more than just art in that they invite viewers to explore and confront their own inner truths.
Fella Cederbaum’s artistic expressions flow organically and naturally, requiring minimal editing: “When I wrote the poems, they formed in my head, and I followed it. I write them very, very quickly. They just come out fully formed,” she says. “I hardly ever edit. It just comes the way it is, and then it’s finished.”
For Fella Cederbaum, this spontaneous process mirrors her overall philosophy of life. She believes that creativity — and life itself — is about letting go of control. You have to trust that something true and real will come through by loosening your grip. Therefore, this theme of surrender shows up not just in her art, but also in the way she lives.
Over time, her love for music and painting grew into today’s full-blown multifaceted artistic expression, bringing her poems to life through her short films, set to her own compositions and set into the magical landscapes of her very unique artwork.
Turning pain into art
A key moment in Fella’s journey was when her private art found its way into the public eye. The Münchner Stadtmuseum in Germany exhibited one of her paintings, and it touched something deep in those who saw it.
The painting, which she called a family portrait, is a reflection on the Holocaust and struck a chord with its raw emotional depth. It made Fella Cederbaum realize that her art could reach beyond the bounds of a private, personal process. She realized that It was something that could, maybe even should, reach — and even heal — others.
Although Fella never compromised the integrity of her natural process, her realization of the universality of her art deeply transformed her view of her work. “Many people find my poetry inspiring and moving. They tell me it has helped heal emotional wounds and alleviated some of the uncertainties of life,” Fella Cederbaum reflects.
She understood then that her creations had the power to help others access their own deeper, often buried, stories and emotions, offering a way to confront complicated feelings that defy the intellect — that defy spoken language. In the same way all of Fella’s creative expressions are effortlessly combined into one coherent message, reflecting that nothing stands alone. Each part is an integral facet of the whole. For Fella, being an artist means to uncompromisingly follow wherever her inner voice leads her, rather than being held hostage by any prescribed path.
The Door: Surrender and self-discovery
One of the core themes in Fella’s work is surrender to the inevitability of life. Her poem The Door captures this perfectly, acting as a metaphor for the personal and emotional surrender she advocates.
“When I let go of the last thought I was holding, I saw a door. When I surrendered the last word of my knowing, I dropped through the floor,” she writes. These lines reflect her own journey toward understanding that true freedom comes from letting go — not just of control, but of everything we cling to.
In The Door, she explores what happens when the walls and floors we have built around ourselves dissolve, revealing a space we did not know existed. For Fella, letting go is not just theoretical — it is a lived experience. She continuously strips away layers of identity and expectations to uncover her authentic self. Through her art, she invites others to do the same.
Looking beyond the self: The Great Offense
As her body of work grew, Fella Cederbaum began exploring wider socio-spiritual issues. In The Great Offense, she shifts her focus to modern communication with its increasing distortions. The poem examines social media culture and how language has become a tool for division.
“Social media accounts are full of stuff, full of stuff that you hate or you love or berate, yet hearing the truth is too tough for the triggered and frail,” she writes.
The Great Offense is more than a critique of online behaviour. It calls to examine how people engage with one another. Fella Cederbaum’s frustration with the lack of meaningful dialogue is evident. Through her witty, rhythmic verse, she challenges her audience to retreat from the noise and consider how to genuinely communicate. Rather than offering easy solutions, she invites her audience to reflect on the chaos of modern discourse and its impact on society.
Art as a path to understanding
Through it all, Fella’s journey as an artist has never been focused on the beauty or conventionality of an end product but rather on serving nothing other than Truth. Thus, her work, though deeply personal, always speaks to universal truths. Through the various mediums, she consistently challenges her audience to look deeper, question their own assumptions, and relinquish control. In that, her probing questions, a mark of her poetry, are relentlessly pointing others inward toward their deeper knowing.
In sharing her journey with the world, Fella urges us to embark on our own vitally important and unique journey of unflinching self-inquiry.
