Alyona Krutogolova has never been trained as an artist. She took a degree at Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, tried painting classically once, found it uninteresting, and stopped — and says a certain artistic ignorance freed her from a good many constraints.
She began exhibiting in 1999, at the Central Art Exhibition Hall in her native Kryvyi Rih. Then a cat museum on the Costa Brava. Then a charity auction in a Kyiv concert hall in aid of a psychiatric hospital, and the Zuza gallery in Rivne, where the local paper came to the opening. In 2011 she hung at the Dali gallery in Kyiv beside two Georgian painters, and one of Ukraine's leading law firms chose her paintings for its annual calendar. By then some five hundred of her works were in private collections from Norway to South Africa.
Everything she paints lives on the same warm terracotta ground, and has for twenty-five years: pet hedgehogs, dreamy floral cats, wandering sea cows, harvest hens and bright-winged owls. A rose blooms on the head of a cheerful hen. A meadow ripens along the flank of a melancholy cow. A young lion's mane bristles with flowers like a florist's window, and bulls carry pots of borscht along the Milky Way. The oil goes on over a built-up textured layer of her own devising, so the surface holds light in a way photographs flatten.
"I have cute, cheerful, decorative works that should bring joy, harmony and positivity to people's homes."
She has painted in Kyiv through the war, often without heat or electricity, and has not changed the subject.
Read more about Alyona — the painter who never trained as one, and the island she built instead.
Fundraiser for Ukraine
Fundraiser Night for the Ukrainian humanitarian efforts. Over $2,500 raised for a local non-profit specializing in delivery of medical supplies to Ukrainian doctors.
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