Magnolias #6 Painting

I grew up in small town near Moscow, Russia. My family is really artistic, mostly in visual arts. My aunt is a director of an art school, my grandmother was an art teacher and my Mom is a painter. I went to an art school and afterwards, a local college of traditional arts, and studied jewelry making. I've always liked different art forms such as drawing and sculpture, but mostly painting. All my life, we would have paintings all over the house. My Mom has always been working on her projects,exhibitions, and sketches so do I now. We like to get together and discuss poetry, music, theater, books, and movies. It's really important to explore other artists and it's interesting to learn where they get their inspiration from and what affected their style. The place where I grew up is world-renowned for artists, because they actually organized the first art school, art college, and art museum there. My Mom's art is really dream-like, so she liked making up fairy tales and going for a walk in local forests. The trees and other plants have always been one of the most attractive subjects to draw for me. I started drawing figures a little later in college. My style is pretty whimsical too and I think it has a lot in common with Russian-Greek church art. Because I am pretty traditionally trained, I learned how to capture something that interests me, how to bring an idea to life, from the first sketch, to making the decision of what medium to work in. Right after I graduated, all my family moved in Portland, Oregon in 2014. I drew inspiration from the natural beauty here. Recently, I went to local festivals where I found people who reminded me of renaissance-era musicians, and that was the subject of many projects afterwards.