Jan 27

Svetlana Gorina

Svetlana Gorina is a painter who started out in fashion, started painting in 1998, and developed into an artist who has exhibited across Europe. Many of her works remain in private collections around the world including Russia, Spain, Israel, France, Armenia, Georgia, and North America. Svetlana has also been featured on Saatchi Art in a collection.

She describes her work as abstract impressionism. The paintings have a lush nature to them as forms of foliage and aspects of nature are represented by large, loose, and improvised brush strokes. Color range within the works are uniquely represented through neutral tones mixed on the palette with bright, expressive colors. Compositionally, the paintings tend to go in a circle and / or emphasize a sense of flatness through design elements such as lily ponds spread out across the canvas.

As a body of work, the paintings can come across as a combination of the romantic paintings of Joseph William Mallard Turner, the late works of impressionist painter Claude Monet, post impressionism of Vincent Van Gogh, abstraction of Paul Klee, and the abstract expressionism of Judith Godwin. Although this mix comes off as entirely unique as a finished entity and refreshingly contemporary.

Overall, the entire body of work remains strongly coherent with a focused message and vision about the aesthetics of paint as a force within itself. The natural scenes seem to be a vehicle of form to express the raw nature of Svetlana’s unique application of brush strokes, rather than the driving force behind the works. These delightful paintings are refreshing to the trained eye, as they may be revisited time and time again as testaments to art which can withstand the test of time. Refreshing as in the unique and almost meditative layout of her compositions shaped through asymmetrical and scratchy brush strokes.

In the end, some may argue what separates fine art from other forms of art is the uniqueness of the artists’ mark. Concepts, composition, color are vastly important, but historically what has initially put the great masters in the history books was their unique mark of the application of their tool. A crude way of describing a style of an artist would be as an accumulation of their mistakes. Or rather, how about an accumulation of the vision they were born with and / or intentionally developed. As to how Svetlana developed her unique, scratchy brush strokes remains to be seen, however their accumulation leads to paintings which capture the purest forms of expression.

These paintings are refreshingly bold, compositionally crisp, and inspirational. No wonder why collectors are nibbling at the chance to obtain her works as most of the body of work remains in private collections. Svetlana Gorina will be remembered as an artist who withstood the test of time.