Sunflower Painting Original Watercolor Still Life Painting Print

Hello! I’m Daria Riabinina. I was born in 1988 in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Since early childhood I somehow knew what I was going to do in life, I remember it clearly. If I saw a painter on plein-air I knew I should not come to peek and disturb him. The artist was in his own world, nobody should ruin his concentration. While other girls were drawing princesses for kindergarten festivals I used to draw the Hermitage surrounded by colorful fireworks. Nobody appreciated my creative work then, which unfortunately happened time and again since. Still, I knew I had to be a painter, so in 2005 I successfully passed a competitive entrance examination to the Saint Petersburg Art School named after Nicholas Roerich. That year master B.V.Lesov took new students to his group. It had shaped some parts of my creative way. In spite of being strict and sarcastic and the limited amount of the jokes he knew (quite terrible ones by the way), he had a profound personality. And his art had a thoughtful quality, the spirit, and warmth of the Russian countryside which I picked from him too. My first truly heartfelt works in my student years were paintings depicting mountains and alpinism. These were the things that captivated me back then. No wonder my graduation work was “The portraits of the alpinists”. Upon graduation, I immediately started preparing to enter the Academy of Fine Arts. It was no easy feat and took a year of dedicated hard work. In summer 2011 my dream came true: I have entered the faculty of painting of the Ilya Repin St. Petersburg State Academic Institute for Painting. Life in the Academy can be called anything but boring. It is the eternal pursuit of something ethereal. 6 years of course exhibitions, plein-airs in different parts of Russia, copying masterpieces in the Hermitage, and meeting extraordinary people. In short, it is the time when you live and breathe art… and the same dusty damp air true masters of the past had breathed a hundred years ago. I studied under master X.V.Savkuev, a terrifyingly energetic man who evoked in me love for the depth of thought in a painting that I had never deemed possible. Under his tutelage, I paint pictures that vary in theme and color form subdued grays and browns to extremely bright almost mosaic bursts of color. During this period I created my favorite paintings about my family that became the foundation for my final graduation work “The family portrait. An old photo”.