"Golden Rocks, 8 PM" Painting

When I paint, I feel alive.
Anya Pautova is an artist born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She graduated with honors from the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Faculty of Monumental Art, and continued her studies in Architectural and Environmental Design at ESBA TALM in Le Mans, France. During her years at the Academy, she trained within one of Saint Petersburg’s leading vanguard art groups, developing a rigorous approach to color and composition rooted in the Russian avant-garde tradition. After her academic training, she returned to direct observation—to landscape, light, and the unmediated experience of being present within a place.

Pautova is a traveling artist whose broader practice, Habitat, documents landscapes, forms of life, and the ways living beings—including humans—inhabit and transform their environments. Working across gouache, oil pastel, tempera, and graphite, she moves between sustained plein-air observation and more immediate studies. In series such as Plein Air Observations, Petites Impressions, and La Nature, she records the particular appearance of a place at a specific moment: shifts of light and atmosphere, plant forms, terrain, weather, and color as it is revealed through prolonged observation. Plein air is not preparatory for her; it is the work itself.

Currently in New York City, Pautova is developing The Bones, a series that turns the same observational attention toward the human habitat. Here, architecture becomes landscape: streets form channels between immense volumes of stone, steel, and glass, while generations of human ambition, movement, and desire accumulate into physical form. The city appears almost geological—a relief cut by human will.

Across these bodies of work, Pautova’s practice forms an evolving record of habitat: fragile ecosystems, constructed environments, ways of living, and transient states of light and presence that will never occur in precisely the same way again. Her studio practice runs alongside public commissions, murals, mosaics, and architectural artwork across the United States, including projects selected through national competitions and institutional restoration work.