Yana Raynus

Your series “The Carnival of Memory” captures a delicate balance between innocence and awareness. What first inspired you to explore this emotional threshold through figurative painting?

I’ve always been fascinated by that fragile moment when childhood begins to dissolve into self-awareness, when wonder and melancholy coexist. Painting felt like the only language that could hold both purity and complexity without having to explain either.

The girls in red dresses feel both present and distant, almost suspended in time. What does the color red symbolize for you in this context?

For me, red isn’t about passion but remembrance. It’s the color of a heartbeat, an echo something that once lived and still vibrates in memory. It connects the figures to emotion, but also to time itself.

Carnival elements—carousels, banners, cotton candy—are traditionally joyful, yet in your work they appear dreamlike and introspective. How did you develop this contrast between festivity and quiet reflection?

I see the carnival as a metaphor for life’s brief brightness: the noise, the beauty, the repetition. When I slow it down on canvas, it becomes something else a still kind of joy touched with nostalgia, the quiet after the music fades.

Your background in fashion illustration and ballet is beautifully reflected in the graceful poses and elongated forms. How do these disciplines continue to influence your artistic decisions?

Ballet taught me rhythm and structure. Fashion illustration gave me elegance and line. Both trained my eye to seek balance between discipline and softness, form and emotion. They’re still present in every movement I paint.

Memory seems to play a central role in this series. Do these paintings originate from personal memories, imagined moments, or a blend of both?

Both. Personal memories create the emotional skeleton, and imagination dresses them. I don’t try to recreate the past, I paint how it felt to live inside it.

You have worked with pastel, acrylic, and oil. Why did oil painting feel like the right medium for this particular series?

Oil gives me time. It dries slowly, like memory itself, and lets me rethink every layer and tone. Its depth of color and softness of blending perfectly matched the atmosphere I wanted -suspended, luminous, almost breathing.

Your work has already entered private collections worldwide. How does audience interpretation influence your future creative direction—do you consider it, or do you prefer to follow your own inner narrative?

I’m always curious how people read my work, but I don’t follow it. Painting is a conversation between my inner world and the canvas. The viewer joins later and that little distance, that mystery, is what keeps the work alive.