New York Wall Street corporate lawyer gives up law for a new life in art.
Beautifully crafted & textured paintings & drawings.
Ukainian-Russian-American artist, Andjana Pachkova, now finds greater happiness when painting the surrounding landscape of her Sydney home and looking after her young family of boys, than practising corporate law on Wall Street.
Growing up in communist Soviet Union was tough, she says, but her parents, although poor, were well educated and ambitious for their daughter. Following Perestroika in the early 1990s, Andjana took classes at the Stroganov Moscow State University of Art & Industry.
In 1997 she won a prestigious Davis Fellowship and moved to the US to study Political Science at Dartmouth College. All the while taking visual art classes. Andjana holds a Bachelor of Law from Moscow International University, a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH) and a Master of Law from Harvard University (Cambridge, MA). After moving to Sydney she further continued with her art studies with courses at Northbridge Visual Art School, Willoughby Art Centre and Woollahra Waverley Art School. She cites artist Tony Tozer her greatest mentor and teacher.
The artist’s personal life has been both greatly blessed and equally challenged.
I did not come to art early or directly or easily but I am here to stay because this path is deeply felt, thought-through and wished for. Besides being an artist is probably one of the few careers where having a life of experiences is a positive thing – a thing that gives you meaning and context. (from Artist Statement – full statement on Press Release).
Seeing the Australian landscape from a non-Australian perspective is not a new theme. But for this Ukrainian-Russian-American artist, this new landscape is also her greatest inspiration. Many of the works are painted around the myriad of bays and bushland around her home in Northbridge on Sydney’s leafy north shore, others of the far western plains of NSW, from Bathurst to Dubbo and then others imagined Australian landscapes and contours.
Andjana is interested in the mutual interaction between people and the landscape and how both are shaped and altered by this interconnection. She explores in her work a sense of uncertainty, perhaps anxiety, “…that how we experience our natural surroundings is changing rapidly”, she says.
In 2013 she relocated to Sydney with her husband and their three young sons. At this time she gave up Law and began her new artist life.
DATES
11-20 May 2016. Open Tue-Sat 11am – 5pm
For more about Andjana Pachkova. Disintegration Anxiety. Paintings & Drawings., visit http://www.andjanapachkova.com
Find us on: YouTube | Facebook