A Quiet Life: Samantha Cavet's Journey To Healing

By @JustinWetch

"It was a very difficult time for me. I moved without knowing anyone. I felt I needed to be isolated and alone and just concentrate on my work."

Samantha Cavet tells me this about her arrival in northern Spain, the genesis of her transformative collection "A Quiet Life." What she found there would reshape not only her art but her entire understanding of what it means to be present.

The Return

"A quiet life is an invitation to return, feel, see, remember what matters." This line from Cavet's project statement carries weight when you understand where she was returning from. She grew up in Venezuela under dictatorship. "My family and I lived in fear for many years," she recalls. "I could never even walk on the street in my city." Using a cellphone in public or wearing anything valuable meant risking theft or kidnapping.

When she finally escaped that reality, she admits: "You normalize a lot of things that you're not supposed to normalize." Moving abroad opened her eyes to how much she'd been unconsciously coping. This context makes her quiet Spanish landscapes feel less like escapism and more like hard-won peace.

But the return went deeper than geography. Cavet was also returning to family roots she'd never fully known. Her Spanish grandmother had fled to Venezuela during the Spanish Civil War, dying just a year after Cavet's family arrived. "I've always felt this strong connection with my grandmother, like since I was a very, very child. And I didn't get to experience her home country with her."

Before our conversation, Samantha sent me some behind the scenes of the collection, including two photos, in the same place but twenty years apart: a field in a small village in Asturias called Lledías, early morning. Dew on the grass. Mountains in the distance. And then her, barefoot, running through it, at 8 years old and 28 years old. The same field, the same body, two versions of herself separated by time.

Grandmother's Colors

Living alone in Santander, Cavet began working on what would become "A Quiet Life," her first true cohesive series. "I think I've never actually worked in a collection before, trying to create a cohesive style, trying to tell a story. So this was very new for me."

The breakthrough came through old photographs. "I found some colors in my grandmother's old photographs. And I immediately saw very vintage-y and muted colors that I wanted to include in the final retouches." Those sepia tones and soft hues from decades-old family photos became the visual language for processing her own journey.

The north Spanish sky itself seemed to echo her inner weather. "The sky was always changing in the north, so you had to understand how the weather worked there in order to imagine what type of mood you wanted to capture."

During those solitary months, Cavet turned inward. "It made me face a lot of insecurities. I took for granted a lot of things in my life before I moved there." She discovered meditation, journaling, and what she calls "a need to return to a more conscious and intentional life."

Painting Time

Cavet has always been known as someone whose photography seems painterly, but this collection sees Cavet go further, painting textures and forms into the images using Procreate. "Those are the ones where I manually worked the textures in the sky. If you zoom in, the textures that you see there are handmade." "I was very inspired by this painter, William Turner," she says. Turner's dramatic skies and textured atmospheres spoke to something she wanted to capture.

While shooting in a beautiful field, Cavet had an epiphany: "Everything I'm looking at right now is changing so fast." She tried to embed that fleeting quality directly into the photograph through movement and texture. Take Sojourner’s Land, whose inky shadows belie two weeks of edits as she wrestled the viewer’s eye toward a distant farmstead.

This hands-on approach reflects her philosophy that her photographs should feel, not just show. "I'm never really focused on what reality should be like, but more how it should feel like."

The Paradox of Peace

Ask Cavet about her creative process and a surprising detail emerges: she edits her serene landscapes while listening to metal music. "Sometimes it surprises people when I tell them that to edit my work, I listen to a lot of metal music. Your work is so peaceful, and metal is so rageful!"

She laughs at the apparent contradiction but explains it makes perfect sense to her. "Because there's something about progressive metal that is very melancholic. And it gets you in a specific emotional state." The intensity helps her tap into deeper feelings. "For me it makes complete sense because it's a way to release and then you get the final result that is more peaceful."

Her editing setup is equally intentional. "I work with very low light. I like to light candles, write a lot, and put specific music." She calls these her "little rituals," creating a meditative space where "every time I'm editing, I enter this specific state where I feel like I'm reliving many things and letting myself feel, and healing."

Time Lives Within It

Cavet's philosophical influences run deep. Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" was revolutionary for her. "I understood during this time that I was in a lot of emotional pain, that a lot of the suffering was coming from connecting to this psychological past that I had." Understanding that "the present is the only thing we have" was "mind-blowing," helping her "step back and understand literally all of my life in a different way."

She also draws inspiration from filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose quote "The image becomes cinematic when not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it" particularly resonates. Cavet recalls working late in her Santander studio, watching how atmosphere shifted with passing hours. "I was thinking a lot about this quote. I have his book, and I was reading it and I was like, 'Okay, how does he think about this? How can I interpret what he meant in photography?'"

The Pilgrimage

The emotional heart of "A Quiet Life" beats in Cavet's pilgrimage to her grandmother's village. "So for me, it was a calling to reconnect with her roots because they've always meant something to me." When she finally visited Ríocaliente, the tiny village in Asturias, emotions overwhelmed her, and left her with a restless wish to one day revive the crumbling stone cottages.

"When I went there, it just reconnected me not only to her, but also to the family story. It was almost like a circle that made so much sense when I was there. It was like discovering her and me at the same time."

But the visit was bittersweet. The village is dying, buildings abandoned, young people gone. "I felt a strong grief to be there and imagine what she went through, what she felt living there." This mix of connection and loss, happiness and sorrow, infuses the entire collection. Involuntarily, she’d retraced her grandmother’s flight; history rhyming across two exiles, two continents.

As a culmination of the project, Cavet wrote a letter to her grandmother. "I started writing a lot when I was there. I filled journals, and I just wanted to remember moments of each day or something important and write a letter to my grandma." This ritualistic act of connection bridges past and present, the living and the dead, in a way that pure images couldn't.

Beyond the Frame

When I ask what ambitions she has that would surprise people, Cavet reveals layers beyond the contemplative photographer. "Now that I'm getting into video, definitely maybe one day create a film." But more significantly, she dreams of helping others through art. "A recurring thing I would love to explore is just trying to help people connect with their creativity, or healing through art."

She envisions workshops or experiences that share creativity's healing power, though she's still finding the right form. Having discovered her own healing through photography, she wants to guide others to similar awakenings.

There's another surprise: the serene artist who creates meditative landscapes loves flamenco dancing and city nightlife. "I also love going to parties, dancing a lot. I do flamenco," she says, laughing at my amazement. "Yeah... that's from my Spanish side."

This duality makes sense within her philosophy. Just as she needs metal music's intensity to create peaceful art, she needs both solitude and celebration, countryside and city, quiet and loud. The quiet life isn't about rejection of vitality but about conscious balance.

The Invitation

"A Quiet Life" is a meditation on presence, an exploration of heritage, and ultimately an act of healing made visible. Each muted frame carries the weight of Cavet's journey from the chaos and danger of Venezuela to the peaceful solitude she enjoys in Spain, from heartbreak to wholeness.

But perhaps most powerfully, it extends an invitation. Not just to view beautiful northern landscapes, but to consider what it means to live quietly in a loud world. To return to what matters. To feel deeply. To remember.

"I'm so emotionally driven that whatever it is I see, I'm gonna add an emotional layer to it," Cavet explains. This emotional truth-seeking, rather than mere documentation, makes "A Quiet Life" resonate. She shows us not just how northern Spain looks, but how it feels to find peace after turmoil, to connect with ancestors through mist and memory, to discover that sometimes the quietest life speaks the loudest truths.

When I ask if she's naturally calm, Cavet laughs. "Yeah, literally, I'm the calmest person ever, for real." But that calm was hard-won, forged through displacement, loss, and conscious inner work. "A Quiet Life" is both the evidence and the invitation to that transformation.

From despotic Venezuela to her grandmother's forgotten village, from heartbreak to artistic breakthrough, Cavet's path proves that sometimes getting lost is how we find our way home. Through painted skies and patient observation, she offers us a map to our own quiet life, whatever that might mean.

The Wrap Up:

When I asked Samantha which of her peers are inspiring her right now, she says “Definitely @summergwagner, I love the way she views the world and tells stories.” Then Jesperish: “He creates complex ideas in his art, which is very inspiring” and @Defacedstudio, whose playful complexity she admires.

She mentions @FreeRunTraveler, @Jd1Sears, @broke0x, @DnoTAO and Ambar from @silkarthouse, @cadmonkxy, and @maxpretends as collectors who helped shape the collection. She thanks @carlothecurator and @jpegbrando from @Ninfa_io for helping curate the collection.

 A Quiet Life releases on Ninfa.io on August 11th at 8pm CET.

Find Samantha Cavet's work at @samanthacavet. For future Weekly Dose of ART features, she suggests: @Jesperish, @aylaelmoussa, and @P1AbyPIA. Samantha was recommended by @tormius.