We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yulia Brodskaya a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Yulia, thanks for joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

I want to acknowledge the importance of the support and encouragement that I received (and still receive) from my family. They encouraged (and sometimes pushed) me to keep creating, never saying or implying that drawing or painting is a waste of time or comes secondary to any other activities or academic studies (which I did well at anyways dealing a golden child syndrome :-) ).

When it comes to art, I was always my biggest critic never fully satisfied with my own creations, but I kept hearing how great my art was and that kept me going.

Being as sensitive as I am, I was lucky never to receive negative criticism for my childhood ‘masterpieces’ – I can easily imagine the shut down effect such experience could potentially have on my early creative streak. Constructive (and on some occasions not very constructive) criticism came much later when I was ready to deal with it. So I’m grateful to my parents for the unconditional praises of my earliest artworks – for me personally such support turned out to be instrumental in keeping me on the artistic path.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I AM a paper artist dedicated to pushing the boundaries of the centuries-old craft known as paper Quilling. Originally trained as a graphic designer, my first paper artworks were born out of a desire to create self-promotional work to impress potential design clients. But by spelling my name ‘YULIA’ in strips of paper, I had unknowingly entered the world of this centuries-old paper craft and completely reinvented it: thanks to over a decade of my paper art practice, Quilling is enjoying a modern revival.

Since my first paper designs attracted attention of the creative industry (thanks to a collaboration with the Guardian newspaper), I was lucky to collaborate with international brands and companies, and work on exciting projects learning and perfecting the techniques along the way.

The key difference of my way of working with paper strips is that by using heavy paper and card I am able to work with single segments of a paper strip without the need to roll it into a basic shape (unlike traditional Quilling that uses very thin light paper that must be rolled into some shape to ensure its stability).
Heavy paper allows me to shape a strip into a single line, that holds its shape and is stable on the surface when glued down. This means that I can introduce new colour with every next strip added and create any design without limitations: basically, if you can draw a line with a pencil, you can then repeat that line with a strip of heavy paper creating a 3-dimensional line. That’s what I call ‘DRAWING with paper strips’.

A few years ago my techniques made another evolutionary turn from ‘drawing’ to ‘PAINTING’ with paper. Painting with paper means imitating brushstrokes with tightly packed strips of paper, achieved by combining different colour strips in a similar way as mixing paints on a palette. This new technique comes as close to the real painting as possible, but with added quality of a third dimension. Obviously combining coloured paper strips in this manner won’t give you a smooth new colour that you can get when mixing paints, it is more of an optical illusion explained by limits of the human eye’s ability to perceive alternating colour stripes — at a certain distance the eye struggles to discern individual stripes and begins to perceive the new blended colour as a whole.

These innovative ways of working with paper strips that I came up with keep me fascinated with paper as a material, and after 16 years of working with paper I know I’ve just scratched the surface of what is really possible to express through this medium.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Nature has always been my main source of inspiration, however I often feel an urge to expand my subject matter: it feels that depicting just a beautiful flower, a pretty shell or a decorative wave on its own is simply ‘not enough’… A human presence is needed to deepen the visual experience, the feel & emotional charge coming from the artwork. So I began combining the natural motifs or Sacred geometry elements with human faces to visualize the inter-contentedness of Humans and Nature, to depict subtle energies invisible to the eye.

The past year I’ve done many paper portraits and each of them has its own inspiration, its own visual language and it was creating them as stand-alone pieces exploring one idea at a time, but recently I realized that there is a common thread going through all of them: in my current art practice I portray ‘people of Gaia’ – organically evolved Humans walking the Ascended Earth…
When I start a new portrait I always have an intention to create from the place of honoring the history and the past – drawing lots of inspiration from various cultures existing on the planet, but at the same time making a conscious choice to bring forward a new vision of the future. Future when we, as a collective, have healed our past, released the pain and integrated all the lessons that brought us all here to this moment in time: unified Humanity – people of Gaia.

These paper portraits are an attempt to visualize this uplifting version of the future (no matter whether one might find it totally unrealistic and or not!!), most of all this is a personal exploration of how this new reality would FEEL like… how would it feel to interact with a human being from this version of the future? What kind of feeling would arise while looking in their eyes? I choose to explore this through portraying people’s faces (as an initial starting point)… But I then incorporate natural elements, geometric shapes, symbols; I visually blend the motifs, patterns, elements that simply ‘feel right’ for the portrait – no other agenda or aim for historic/cultural accuracy; just looking to bring forth this subtle ethereal feeling of ascended future timeline, to make it a little bit more tangible/palpable by utilizing all the creator skills that I can master in this moment.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

played with them a little bit, but wasn’t able to visualize their future trajectory

Contact Info:

• Website: www.artyulia.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yulia_brodskaya_artyulia/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paperdesignart/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFurnbIc1ExvgScWlXVOiQ
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@yulia_brodskaya

Image Credits
a credit line to the ‘Mother Energy’ artwork if you decide to include it: Inspired by Julia Watkins art & Franck Lavoyer photography