We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Maria Savchenko. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Maria below.

Alright, Maria thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

For me learning is a day to day process even when I don´t touch a brush. Whenever I go to bed and close my eyes, I start to have myriad of pictures, shifting shapes, ideas of new paintings, to the extent that I want to scream, please stop, I need to remember, I need to jot it down. Or at least to have an idea of what I have seen, or what my mind has conjured. If I had a desire to invest in anything at all it would be a machine that records all the visuals from under my eyelids when I close my eyes. It trains my memory and creativity a lot!

Talking about the beginnings, I opened my first painting exhibition when I was five years old. It was all fun and games until I had to choose a profession for life and then I wasn’t guided in a right direction. Lack of good high educational establishments that taught art made the choice for me at that point. I went on to study foreign languages.

When I first understood that I wanted to make art my primary occupation it was eyeopening. Once, I looked at the sky and asked myself, how would I paint it? Which paint and how, what sort of brushwork? It all looked to me like a painting of Van Gogh that came alive like in that movie that they made about his life, but in front of me, in front of my eyes.

Things turned into painting objects and I was itching to understand how to depict them, how they would look on paper or canvas. And there came the tricky part. I had a pretty genius teacher and the London College or Arts, Central Saint Martins. He said something that would save a lot of people a lot of trouble. He said, feel around and understand which subject matter you want to be painting and go for it. Understand the technique, and really put hours into it, don´t spread yourself too thin. He also told me, ¨Don’t write your artist signature too thick on the painting, it’s naff, darling!¨ That would be my advise to all beginning artists as well!

I have been learning my craft with a few very talented artists, one in my art school in Donetsk, Egor Kolomoytsev, my flowering inspiration and my oil guru in Kyiv, Anna Dakhno, and later in my studies of contemporary art in Saint Martins, Guy Noble. There have been many more, but these were the ones who have left the biggest mark.

It took quite some time to master my own style, my eye was travelling a lot. Now I feel that I have taken a bit from all my old masters, the academic approach of the old school, the beauty of depicting nature, and the new approaches to modern art, all mixed together. Needless to say, I am always learning something new!

Maria, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a ¨re-¨ artist. No, I don’t repurpose canvases, brushes etc, only those of my own. I even have a series of paintings called ¨Pentimenti¨ A painting that bears the traces of your previous journey, your previous life. How did we get to where we are. How are we as good/sick/knowledgeable/twisted/ more understanding than we used to be. I am a ¨re-¨ artist. I had to reimagine my life from scratch a bunch of times. And not because I never learn. But specifically because I do. I believe in rebirth of oneself and one’s spirit after death, failure, changes.

My major medium is canvas, I use both acrylic and oil paint, mixes thereof and quite a bit of mixed media, like collage. The style in which I work in is best described as abstract expressionism. I explore the interaction of shapes, impact of colour while bringing about works packed with references of other styles and art eras.

An important purpose in my work is to create a piece of art that will touch a cord in the viewer´s heart and make them see the possibilities of the reconstruction of life, patterns, recomposition of habits and life experiences into new shapes and dynamics of what one wants their life to be.

Living in Miami and participating in major art events like Art Basel has been extremelly enriching for me and brought my art to a new level.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

What I find the most rewarding about being an artist is creating something that has never existed before. It is like bearing a child, different from all other children that had ever existed before, unique, and just yours.

Secondly, the awesome part is that my work does not depend on anyone’s personal opinion. I can innovate, shock, amuse, encourage, or all of the above altogether. Morerover, I can work and create on my own schedule, and this is bloody fantastic.

Likewise, I get supremely inspired by seeing other artist’s works, and this is the fountain of inspiration that will never dry out. There will be no end to art. You can’t possibly run out of subject matter.

To cap it all, people also see you as an innovator, free spirit. A person who is pursuing their heart’s desire. ¨You can do absolutely anything¨ some people say to me, ¨You are an artist¨ And there is a big degree of truth to that. Also, people want to know you. Want to know what you have said through your art. One can create narratives and set trends.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

As I have mentioned before, I am a ¨re-¨ artist not for no reason. There have been a bunch of shakeups in my past that have changed the course of my life drastically.

Firstly, I am Ukrainian, which is a synonym now not only of strength, love and endurance, but a homage to a nomadic life, in my case by choice. Having to move and abandon your home, family, friends, your history, willingly or unwillingly, changes you forever. What I am trying to do in this process is to be mindful of those changes and streamline them into something constructive, rebuilding and reimagining myself in any new environment. The latter actually is an eternal source of inspiration.

A paramount change happened when I met my husband-to-be, who wasn’t from Ukraine. By that time, I had gotten to the top of what is considered great for my former profession in PR, next would be to move on to run my own PR business, which didn’t sit right with me. And then came the war in my city of Donetsk, and it shook me a great deal. I had to try and relocate part of my family from the war affected areas of Donbass, I had to try and figure out my personal life. It was then when I was posed in front of a dilema, whether to go on with my corporate job, or to make a pause and understand what I truly want, it was a now or never moment. And it was at that time when I ultimately decided to never let go of the brush. I could fool myself no more.

A road like this is always bumpy, I tried educating myself in an array of matters like photography, fashion, trend prediction etc, but art and painting has always had my heart and it won by a landslide. Since then, for almost ten years now I am a full time artist, a decision that made me whole, made me happy, and brought sense to my life.

Contact Info:

• Website: mariasavchenko.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maria_savchenko_official/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MariaSavArtist
• Other: https://www.quora.com/profile/Maria-Savchenko-2 Email: [email protected]

Image Credits
Maria Savchenko