When I was a child, my kindergarten teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would always reply that I wanted to be an artist. I've loved drawing since I was a kid. Having once seen a calendar with Aivazovsky reproductions and a book full of Chagall paintings, I just fell in love with those works. I was very inspired and wished I could create something equally beautiful. In high school, I was taking private lessons of painting and drawing for 2 years, later I went to art school. After school, I graduated from the University of Culture and Arts in Kemerovo with a degree in Graphic Design. There I learned to style, which greatly influenced my artistic perception, and hence my paintings.

I’m Katya, a Ukrainian photographer, a poet, and a content writer (not necessarily in that order). I used to be a digital nomad, jumping from country to country, but the pandemic has somehow changed the situation, so currently I am staying in one place and, just like the song by Depeche Mode said, I “let my mind do the walking”. I’ve visited 15 countries so far, and I would love to add some new ones to the list.

Hello and thank you so much for having me! I know it doesn’t sound original at all, but art has always been important to me. I have wished to become a painter since I was a kid, even though back then I didn’t feel that it could actually happen. However, I enjoyed drawing and later painting more than anything else, seizing every opportunity to practice. I would draw my teachers at school until they finally accepted my hobby and just allowed me to do that. I also loved sketching people in the underground. It was me who turned my family kitchen into one big artistic mess when my parents would leave.

I became immersed in photography even as a child. The first time I took up the camera was when my mother asked me to photograph her in the forest in winter. I was about 5 years old at the time. Later, at university, I learned that my grandfather was a photographer, too. As a teenager, I shot a little on a simplest cheap film camera that everyone had then, and studied Painting at an art school.

Hazegallery presents a new virtual exhibition, “Analogue Photography" featuring works by contemporary young artists working on film photography.

Abstract painting is a form of art that does not try to create an exact representation of a visionary reality, but uses surfaces, lines, colors, shapes, textures and gestural signs to achieve its effect. Nevertheless, such an abstract image can attract the person with its shapes. That is exactly what inspires me and is what drives me to paint such pictures.