Zhanna Hurkina-Sysina
Year of birth: 1988
Where do you live: Belarus, work and live between two cityes Molodechno and Smorgon
Your education: Economist, master’s degree in Economics
Describe your art in three words: Juicy, positive, talking
What inspired you to start painting, especially since you have a background in economics?
The impetus for the beginning of creativity for me was a feeling of emptiness and confusion in a difficult period of my life-I was going through a series of difficult events related to me and people close to me. Trying not to get depressed, one day I went to a bookstore and bought a pack of drawing paper, a simple pencil and an eraser. When I got home, I sat down and started drawing the first thing that came to mind. By drawing, I was leaving reality and it helped me to discover new things in myself and cope with difficulties with dignity. A few days later, I was already learning the basics of drawing three-dimensional shapes and the anatomy of a human face. I had never studied drawing before and all my drawing skills were reduced to drawing lessons in high school. After a while, I switched to drawing with dry pastels, and a few months later I bought my first tubes of acrylic paints, brushes and canvas.
How does your academic experience in economics influence your approach to abstract painting?
It has no effect whatsoever. And it’s true. I am an economist, an accountant who has been working in the profession all my working life and has defended my dissertation on economics. I was a senior employee, the head of a department, and this obliged and influenced my behavior, the manifestation of emotions and a lifestyle dominated by dynamics, rigor of style and behavior, specificity and formality. Art has given me the opportunity to see myself and the world around me in a different way – without focusing on time, rules and cliches.
Abstraction allows to see the complex in the simple, and the simple in the complex.
Zhanna Hurkina-Sysina, The flight of the soul, 2024Could you describe your creative process from the moment you choose your colors to the final brushstroke?
I start working with canvas by choosing the colors of the paints that I want to apply. From the palette, I intuitively choose the colors that I want to use right now. In my work, I use a palette knife and sometimes a golden potal. After choosing the colors, I start applying them to different parts of the canvas, and then I start working with a palette knife, mixing them together right on the canvas. Before I start painting, I never know what I want to paint. After applying paints to the canvas and mixing them, images and accents are born in my imagination, which I draw and refine on the resulting color combinations. I like to make accents with thick and sweeping strokes of paint, creating texture and giving the viewer the opportunity to literally touch the stroke with a palette knife.
What do you hope people feel or experience when they see your work?
I hope that the positive, energy and desire to consider the details of my work, which change the first impression of the painting as a whole, revealing the whole story I told on the canvas.
Zhanna Hurkina-Sysina, Tanderine Sorbet, 2023You often use bright and juicy colors. What role do colors play in conveying your artistic message?
There are a million colors and shades, semitones in the world, but the modern frenzied rhythm of life forces people to hurry, fuss, plunging into the dullness of everyday life and events. In my paintings, through colors, I want to awaken the audience’s memories of moments in their lives and events that are continuously connected with colors. We all remember the color of our favorite toy in childhood, the color of the foliage in the park when we walked with the guy who became our first crush, the color of the mown and fragrant grass on which we ran to meet the wind with a kite, the color of our beloved mother’s vase that we broke. There is a lot of magic concentrated in color and I believe and feel it.
How do you decide when a painting is finished? Is it an intuitive feeling, or do you have specific criteria?
This is purely intuitive.
Can you share a story behind one of your favorite paintings and what it represents to you?
I think it’s “Visavi”. The painting was created specifically for the first in my life, as a participant in the general republican exhibition in Minsk in March 2024. In the process of creating it, I used thick layers of paint and various shapes of palette knives. Already in July of this year, this painting became a diploma holder of the 3rd degree at the international competition in London.
Zhanna Hurkina-Sysina, Lightness, 2024
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