Marina Savashynskaya

Marina Savashynskaya is a contemporary abstract painter who has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, especially in the American South, particularly in Georgia and South Carolina and internationally in Dubai. Recent solo exhibitions include Octavia Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, The Gibbes Museum of Art and Miller Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina. Marina has had speaking engagements at Columbus State University, College of Charleston : School of the Arts, Spalding Nix Fine Art in Atlanta, the W.B. Bradley Museum, The Columbus Museum, and The Gibbes Museum of Art. Her work has been published by The Southern Review at Louisiana State University, Magzoid Magazine, Business Insider, as well other publications.

When you visit Marina’s artist website you are greeted with a video guiding you into her painting process. The video reveals pools of water being poured onto the surface and the brush being allowed to bleed the paint onto the canvas as well showing her use heavy mixtures of water with her paint. She incorporates sand onto the canvas in order to create a sense of texture and grainy finish. Although the paintings are an exercise in abstractions, there are clear asymmetrical forms created which almost resemble folds of fabric. As if multi-colored sheets of linen were stretched out over layers of each other under impact of heavy light. The aquatic, prismatic, and luminous display of the paintings reveal a painting process deeply inspired by reinventing contemporary notions of abstraction. Clear forms, linearity, and improvised shapes of shadow fold upon the facet to create fascinating compositions filled with both curves and angles.

Alpenglow (pictured above) portrays a painting deeply embellished in the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. Each of the primary hues became gradually saturated into pigments of orange, magenta, and green. As each color folds upon each other, they create transitions in light and variation. There remains shadows and indentations of form within these folds of shapes in soft delicate shades of black. The painting comes across as hyper-pristine and as if peering through glass pressed upon folds of elegant multi-colored drapery. Intricate shading remains applied to the non-objective shadows. As each fiber-like form covers the other a deep transparent and impression of luminosity alters the colors underneath the dominant colors hovering above. A delightful painting which evokes joyful tones, soothing low contrast, and deep richness in subtle color.

Marina Savashynskaya’s imposing body of work reflects an immeasurable level of maturity in understanding of the sheer flow of paint. She has a profound comprehension of the relationship between paint and surface on a level very few artists can match. The immense aesthetic value of the paintings remains beyond words and perhaps even comprehension. These quietly intense yet elegant paintings evoke emotions of calmness and stimulation simultaneously. The paintings also capture a sense of stillness and motion in the drastic variation of form and angles while remaining flat yet dynamic. As a reflection of our senses, these works represent hyper-awareness, not of our surroundings but rather of the very nature of sensory reality. A crude way to describe her work would be as hallucinogenic, a more sophisticated analysis would perceive the paintings as a sense of deeper understanding of the destruction of light. As some artists deconstruct structures and form, Marina offers a post-structuralist interpretation of the definition of light as if not only reinventing painting but the notion of optics as well.