Iryna Lialko

I create because I don't know any other way to live. I have an unquenchable need to give, as though I were a sponge: first I absorb water and then fully squeeze it out. I have a filter which transforms water into an elixir of life. Sometimes I feel that my human soul has unknown, other-worldly genes. Mixing human love and experience, and earthly beauty with other-worldly sparks, I create art. Sometimes I have a vision of worlds where space is perceived differently. I become obssessed with this vision. I cannot sleep or eat. I have different moods like fresh, nostalgic or sad. I need to create what I see. Sometimes I have an idea or thought which I want to deliver to the viewer, and I decipher it in images that allow a sense of my idea to gradually discover itself through its unique aesthetic beauty. I also express my ideas through paintings in which I create am elusive but very alive and trembling spirit or soul which produces associations in the viewer\'s eye. I intend the images from my paintings to penetrate softly into the viewer\'s human soul, below the levels of conscious understanding. I hope that my art will bring love, joy, sincerity and compassion. To paint this kind of art, music helps. In fact, I am a geuine music lover; for me, music functions as if it were resonating through the air to bring me a flow of chi energy. I wake people to life on such a level of harmony. Above all, I encourage them to express themselves through art and beauty.

In my childhood everything started with colored pencils.

In kindergarten, we always got pencils to draw with, but just one. And I always got blue. Having just one color produced in me a love of graphic symbols and symbolic graphics. For me they were visual signs which interrupted space. I was always attracted to the process of drawing itself.

I also had gifts from my father who was a creative man. From childhood he trusted in me regarding serious matters. We discussed the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and the energy his pictures were saturated with.

When I enter my creative state my inner sensitivity and vision sharpens its focus, while everything connected with everyday life fades into the background. At night when I cannot fall asleep I see exciting otherworldly spaces and visions and I hurry to wake up to start working/creating/painting.

The folk culture of Ukraine definitely influenced my art. In Ukraine, they like my work but somehow I felt that my more abstract paintings were not understood and that's why they didn't find places in galleries. Then I thought of sending my work to Latvia and other foreign countries, and was surprised to receive awards and honorable mention from many of them.

In 2006 I graduated National Academy of Fine Arts & Architecture in Kiev, Ukraine with degrees in interior decoration and architecture.