Anna Yurasovsky — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

May 5

May 5 Anna Yurasovsky

Biography

Anna Yurasovsky is an artist and photographer based in Moscow, Russia. She started painting at a very early age and studied art for ten years at a Moscow art school. Alongside her art career, she received a university degree in English, worked as a translator and journalist, and travelled worldwide. Her impressive body of artwork reflects her visions of various places in North America and Europe, as well as the Russian countryside and her native city of Moscow, throughout several decades.

What first prompted you to think of becoming an artist?

My mother worked in fashion design, and when I was very young, not yet one year old, she would give me her fabric scrap collection to play with. She later told me that this was one of my favourite pastimes before I learned to walk: to handle these soft treasures, marvelling at their fancy colours and textures, even though I do not remember it myself. The city of Moscow (then the capital of the USSR), where I was born and have lived to this day, offered excellent educational opportunities. I was admitted to an art school when I turned six, one year before I started regular general school. This happened because the school was nearby, and my parents had realized how much I loved drawing with coloured pencils and painting with watercolour. In fact, my present home, and my studio, are also in downtown Moscow, within just a few miles from the places where I went to school, and later to university. The art school where I studied for ten years had been established in the 1920s as a comprehensive art academy for children. We spent many hours drawing from classic plaster casts, learning to work with different materials, and painting a broad variety of subjects. However, all this would happen later. What I remember from those first days in September when I walked to the art school with my new paintbox and cardboard tube was the sudden realization that painting could be an occupation, a career, and not just a spontaneous reaction to the visible world around me.

What kind of an artist do you ultimately see yourself?

As an art student, I started with realism, there was simply no other choice at that time. But I loved it - the attempt to recreate the objects and people exactly as they appeared to be in real life, and more often than not I failed to achieve an exact likeness. As I gradually developed my skills, towards the end of my art school course, I grew immensely bored with it. Over the next decade, I came to the realization that the true way for me to evolve as an artist was through expressionism, not realism. Gradually I developed my own recognizable style that can be described as ‘paint-stitching’. Oddly, it can also be defined as an essentially female form of art. Traditionally, for thousands of years, many female artists were artisans creating beautiful things to be used in everyday life: home decorations, clothing, and so on – including embroidery. A century ago, women (not all of them, but quite a few) used to embroider a lot. My grandmother did, and one of the first pieces of original handmade art that I saw, on the wall in front of my bed, was the large cross-stitched still life with lilacs in a vase that she did herself. It was my routine as a child, before sliding off to sleep, to visualize that bunch of lilacs as a town with rows of small houses climbing over a steep hill. Then it would transform into a crowd of big faces, each with its own unique expression. I was absorbed in that imagery, switching between the two fantasies while fully realizing that these were primarily just flowers. All this was possible due to the semi-abstract cross-stitch technique that allows the viewer a variety of interpretations. So, in a certain sense, I seem to have come back to where I started, only on a different level.

What are you hoping to communicate to the viewer through your work?

I hope ultimately to portray the time and space that I live in. Or, to put it another way, to reflect the flow of space through time, and the flow of time through space.

Can you explain the process of creating your work?

As one can immediately see, my paintings are very detailed. The process is launched when something that caught my eye in real life, some dramatic visual impression, transforms into an image inside my head, and I feel an urge to put it on a piece of canvas. I start with a sketch painted with big and medium-sized brushes. After that first coating of paint has dried, I proceed to the next stage of meticulously applying all those small strokes, dots and lines with tiny brushes, and this can take many hours, weeks, months, or even years. I usually work on several paintings at once, alternating between them depending on my mood. I have learned never to take commissions. The collectors see only my finished work and then decide whether they like it or not. That way, there is no compulsion (for me), and no disappointment (for them).

What is your favourite part of the creative process?

It is of course the inspiration that triggers the entire process. That moment when there is just an empty canvas in front of my eyes, and an array of pigments on the palette in my hand. And then the satisfaction, the joy, the relief when the painting is finished, have ‘cooled off’, and can be shown to friends, publicly displayed in a show or exhibition, posted on websites and social networks – in short, bragged about. (It is not that I never fail – I do consider some of my artworks to be failures). But when something is completed, it also means that I am free to start anew. I love the frenzy, the torment, the long struggle with the matter, but I also love it when the process of creating a particular painting is over. The result is never what I expected it to be in the beginning, so the creative process is always a discovery.

Can you give us an insight into current projects and inspiration, or what we can look forward to from you in the near future?

Currently, I have probably more than a dozen paintings that can be described as work-in-progress. These are so-called ‘traditional paintings’ in oil, alkyd and acrylic (portraits, landscapes, still lives, night skies with heavenly bodies). New digital media are fascinating, and the digital age is sweeping us along. In my youth, I could never imagine that paintings created in the solitude of an artist’s studio could be instantly transmitted across the globe, processed, reshaped, used in so many ways, and viewed by thousands or even millions of people visiting online galleries. And I have never yet tried digital painting. So, what can I expect to be doing a year from now? Digital book illustration? Mastering fabric design software? 3D printing? I think that I am now ready to explore all these possibilities, as they offer new prospects for my career.

Website https://annayurasovsky.pixels.com/

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