Luba Magdenko
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I have been painting and drawing since childhood, through medical art school and beyond. I am motivated and enlivened by colour and line. Painting allows my mind to rest, at the same time to come up with solutions to issues while not directly thinking about them. I work in alternating layers of acrylic paint and coloured pencils to achieve depth of colour, precision in some places, looseness in others. Not enslaved to photorealism, I want the work to feel like an illustrated version of what I see. I simplify some elements of the piece and intensify others.
I have taught art to children and adults, particulary working from nature, life drawing and portraiture. When painting myself, I prefer birds, flowers and still life because of the different textures that make up a work: feathers, branches, beaks, the delicate legs of the bird, glass, ceramic, wood, greenery and sky looming somewhere in the background. Nature has healing powers. Beauty gives me goosebumps. A teacher once said to "make love to the surface you work with". So today, I don't fight with the surface, I don't push it around or make it do things it does not want to. It serves as a firm foundation for my work and any irregularities in the texture of the wood or hard surface I work on are seen as opportunities to work with. I work on the surface with sensitivity, almost gliding the paint and the crumbly coloured pencils over it. I paint not just for myself but also to motivate the viewer to think about beauty, to stop and appreciate the beauty of all that is both in the frame of my work and around, and to work to secure the protection and cultivation of these environments. I hope you see this in my work. |
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