About Masha Gross
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Biography
My name is Masha Gross, I am an illustrator from Moldova. I graduated from Plamadeala Arts College and Chisinau Academy of Fine Arts. Working in the genre of modern realism, I explore everyday life and endow it with poetry in my work. I paint landscapes and simple objects that surround me, and for me, these are the emotions that I want to live. I can live by them only by painting.
We do not like routine, we try to avoid it, opposing bright events, places, and situations to it. This is quite natural because it is new experiences that shape us, develop, and nourish our brains. I find all this in typical everyday scenes and landscapes, trying to depict not the objects themselves, but the emotion that I see instead.
I have always gravitated towards paper and watercolor, even when I studied painting and painted on canvas with oils as part of my studies. Paint on water has always been closer to me than oil because it is more like tears. I chose markers as my primary technique, turning an almost graphic tool into a painterly one - a line into a brushstroke.
Living in a small post-Soviet republic, at the turn of two eras, I, like many of my peers, became part of this aesthetics and this culture. My childhood began in the Soviet Union and ended in perestroika. I tried to see and comprehend the theme of the transformation of the post-Soviet space in the same way, in the form of emotions, colors, and forms. In my works, I explore the aesthetics of post-perestroika life and space, observe how it evolves and what subconscious prints it leaves on our sense of self.
At the same time, depicting landscapes as they are, and at the same time poeticizing and aestheticizing reality, I capture these sensations, translating them almost into signs.
Like any artist, I am in constant search of new forms, subjects, materials, and artistic language. But in my works, I try to create an ambiguous mood, and complex emotions, akin to when you observe some kind of ridiculous, almost ugly architectural object, while bathed in the warm golden sun. By using contrasts and contradictions, I want to create an emotional background that will be partly therapeutic for me and my generation in the ways that are available to me.
