BIO
Anastasiya was born in Ukraine and immigrated with her parents to the US in her early teens years. Having lived in New York for most of her life, she moved to Dallas, Texas in 2013 where she currently resides with her husband and three kids. Anastasiya began drawing and painting in her early childhood and received figure-based studio training growing up. She would go on to study architecture at the prestigious Cooper Union in New York City and currently holds a Master's degree in the subject. Architectural training brought a formal rigor to her work process and served to enhance the spatial qualities and design sensibility in her portraits. In recent years Anastasiya has been studying realist portraiture and figure privately with artists she admires. The private studies helped Anastasiya to define her aesthetic voice and sense of expression. Currently she focuses on portraiture in her art practice and teaches drawing and design studios at the University of Texas at Arlington. Anastasiya’s work is found in private collection in Texas, New Hampshire, New York as well as Germany, Russia and Ukraine.
Anastasiya’s portrait work is known for its focus on her subject’s identity and mystical inner state of emotion. Her current series focuses on the woman as a locus of force that is expressed through and found in motherhood. Anastasiya’s paintings invoke an intimate connection with her subjects and provoke a dialogue about the role of tradition and personal choice.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I draw and paint people that possess answers. Currently I capture mothers in search of defining the role of tradition and the extent of personal choice that women have in the current age. Secretly I hope to absorb and never let go of the forces that I behold when I paint my subjects. Realism is my preferred style because I choose to maintain as much adherence to the visual appearance of my subjects as I can. Why? Because I believe that there is a profound interlink between the external and the internal. I believe that an individual deserves every wrinkle on her face. I think that being very curious and very attentive earns you the right to judge a book by its cover. I stare into the eyes of my subjects for many hours and at some point I think I understand them. Maybe I’m delusional, but I enjoy this belief.