Hi! I’m Johanna, aka Montalut, and I’m an artist and gatherer.
My mission is to find beauty in the everyday…and invite you to be brave and honest, one day at a time.👋🌈
Thank you for being here!
LEADIA is the artwork of my life, to bring together founders, creatives and leaders to live, work and play in multiple inspiring locations around the world.
If you’re positive, curious, open to new things + diverse perspectives, and thrive in excellence, reach out please! Let’s see what we can build together.
What is Everyday Art?
Raw and simple art: doodles, paintings and living spaces.
🖋Doodles: I doodle to recenter and play, and I love to give Montalut Doodles as gifts.🎁 Friends like to post them on mirrors, refs, doors–places they see everyday. Some say they even have healing energies for their spaces.💜
🎨 Paintings: My fave tool to paint with is the palette knife, and fave medium is acrylics. They feel the most playful and spontaneous, and I’m experimenting now with the same vibe for digital.
🏡 Living spaces: My life project and big dream is to create living spaces that inspire us to be who we are. Leadia Growth merges my two worlds: real estate and art. Really grateful to be doing this with my husband and co-founder, Koray Erimez 🙏💙
Montalut as Artist
I hope my works inspire others to be braver.
My path has always been a spiritual one, as the impulse to paint began as a call to be quiet and connect. In the very early days, I would paint the sun and fishes. I found home in the works of Rilke and Rumi, which filled a lot of my doodles.
The name Montalut came to me in a dream, and the closest lead I have to what it means came in 2014: that it’s the medieval name of Salignac, a port in Southern France. Someday my adventures will take me there.
Art is an everyday practice in courage, and it is a movement towards integrity, that space where we are able to make our life decisions, whether big or small, flow in complete congruence with our highest values. It is an everyday striving to be our best selves across the board–head, heart, and body.
Montalut
When I create, it’s always an invitation to connect, linger in my creative process and let it bring forth something new in you. A lot of my work comes from asking questions about life and what goes on inside ourselves, as well as outside. I hope that in interacting with my paintings and doodles, you also start asking your own questions.
Montalut as Gatherer: Creative Communities
Living and Breathing Creativity
When I was studying art, I kept thinking, “If I keep at this I can become a great painter. And then what?”
I knew then that producing great paintings isn’t what my art is about. I want to engage people in an ongoing conversation that builds up the courage to ask the difficult questions. I want to seek answers together. I want to get people involved in the creative process itself, to be comfortable (again) in the new and unknown. I want people to become artists themselves.
I loved the atelier school I went to in New York, and told myself that someday, I’d build a happy place just like that: a school built by artists for artists, housed in a magical century-old building overflowing with so much life!
I’d been a teacher before and cherished the idea of building a school for creativity not just in the arts, but in all aspects of everyday life. I pushed this idea further and thought, “How do I make whatever I’m going to teach others last a long, long time? How do I turn it into a new habit? Or a new lifestyle?” That’s when I expanded this idea to build not just a school but a living space that lives and breathes creativity.
As an artist-entrepreneur, I’m building “the house that protects the dreamer”: creative environments that inspire conversations through connection, balance and beauty, supercharged by NFTs. These would be holistic online and IRL communities with hubs for art, enterprise, education, tech, and nature.
This project is the convergence of my many selves: artist, mom and teacher with over two decades in real estate, and most recently co-founder of two tech startups, the Leadeana Group and the Leadia Growth project. We are everyone we’ve met, including our past selves, and I will always wear these hats in some form, carrying on the conversations that bring joy, authenticity, and community to the table.
Montalut Creative Communities aka LEADIA
As a gatherer, my dream is to build and live in multiple global seaside communities with like minds, developing hubs for art, enterprise, education, tech, and nature.
This is an ongoing project–and we’re always looking for collaborators!