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.

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.

In the Italian artistic culture, I feel very close to “Arte Povera”, particularly to the figure of Alighiero Boetti. Since many years of work, I can say that my artistic production has been influenced more by the Italian culture of living everyday life. I currently live in Turin, but the city where I was fully formed is Naples.

My pleasure. I've been drawing for as long as I can remember. first it was an art school, then an institute, an academy ...but the understanding that I am ready to devote my life to art came to me when I was about twenty years old, in St. Petersburg I met the artist Vasily Bratanjuk, he made me understand that art is not only inspiration but also hard work ... work of selv development.

We know it’s been a while since we published the last In Focus episode… But look, the hiatus had its reasons — well, we had, sinking back into the concerns of the new year. On the plus side, we promise that in 2021 the column will be in some way even more exciting than it used to be last year with some new bright and inimitable talents in the limelight. And the first in line here is a conceptual artist and a photographer, whose works one can hardly pass by indifferently. Meet Sandy Skoglund!

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Rachel Papo has spent her life in two countries, the US and Israel. Having been shooting since her teenage years, Rachel picked photography to meet her career ambitions and tell other people’s stories. Whether serving in the Israeli Air Force as a photographer or visiting a renowned Russian ballet school, the photographer always knows what to focus on to create an enthralling narrative that would be rather close to life.