About Jenya Pestova
Biography
I started painting early in my childhood. My grandmother once told me the term absurdity and explaining it, she drew a very small house and a very large mushroom, much bigger than the house. She told me that if the subject is strange, ridiculous it's called absurd.
I immediately started drawing amazingly strange things that don't exist or don't look like they really should. It fascinated me so much that I still experience the same childish joy of teleportation into my personal world that I create on paper or canvas.
20 years after those first drawing lessons with my grandmother, I was already a successful graphic designer, graduated after high school of design, where I was taught to draw anatomically correct figures and incredibly boring, but photography-like still life paintings. I asked myself: do I really want to be a full-time artist? Or will I still put off my childhood dreams? What is more important to me - to combine other people's photos, draw layouts and frames or create my own worlds and invite people to visit them with me? Probably you already got the answers.
The most important question for me now is to find my inner freedom to do what I really want without constantly seeking outside approval. As a woman from Russian traditional society, since childhood, I’ve been told what I should and should not do. My life as an artist is an opportunity to stop doing what everyone around me expects me to do, find what I dream to do, how I dream to paint and to inspire other women artists on this difficult journey.
The technique I work in best describes the term Mixed media. In one artwork I can combine the abstract background with acrylic paints and oil paints on top, the same way as my life looks like: being a woman, an artist, a migrant, living everyday life and running exhibitions.
20 years after those first drawing lessons with my grandmother, I was already a successful graphic designer, graduated after high school of design, where I was taught to draw anatomically correct figures and incredibly boring, but photography-like still life paintings. I asked myself: do I really want to be a full-time artist? Or will I still put off my childhood dreams? What is more important to me - to combine other people's photos, draw layouts and frames or create my own worlds and invite people to visit them with me? Probably you already got the answers.
The most important question for me now is to find my inner freedom to do what I really want without constantly seeking outside approval. As a woman from Russian traditional society, since childhood, I’ve been told what I should and should not do. My life as an artist is an opportunity to stop doing what everyone around me expects me to do, find what I dream to do, how I dream to paint and to inspire other women artists on this difficult journey.
The technique I work in best describes the term Mixed media. In one artwork I can combine the abstract background with acrylic paints and oil paints on top, the same way as my life looks like: being a woman, an artist, a migrant, living everyday life and running exhibitions.
