For a long time I painted flowers, and they were always about people. A flower does not prove its value or compete with others. It does not decide who deserves more light. It simply exists as part of something larger. At some point I wanted to look at people directly.

This series began after a summer with family in Kazakhstan and Poland, and the autumn that followed, when I kept remembering my first school years and my childhood home. I realised how many days I had not spent with my grandmother, my aunts and uncles. My father's family is very large, yet we rarely gathered. In the past I often felt lonely, and I never really knew the feeling of a big family.

But I don't want to paint loneliness. I want to see life as a chance to change it. These paintings are warm imaginings of how it could have been, and of what it can still become, for me and for my son. I consciously paint an ideal world: one where people come together, where everyone is noticed and everyone is welcome. I want a painting to bring joy and to remind us that such a world is possible.

My childhood was multicultural. In Kazakhstan we celebrated every holiday, and plov, baursaks, kimbap, kimchi and Easter bread all shared one table. Uzbek patterns feel as familiar to me as Kazakh ones. So no single nation is named in these works. The culture in them is mixed and shared, the way I remember it.

The figures are stylised and deliberately "incorrect". Their faces are almost masks, and what speaks is gesture, posture, the colour of clothing, the way bodies lean toward each other. In a crowd it is easy to stop seeing each person. I want the opposite: to paint many people and still give attention to every one of them.

The pink stays. As in A Reason to Notice, it is a choice to see the world a little brighter, and to notice joy, tenderness and the people beside us.

If you want more love in the world, answer with love.

This series marks a new stage in my artistic practice. Although it touches upon melancholy, it is not about suffering. I am more interested in the moments that exist alongside it — the small, ordinary things that make life feel worth noticing.
The series is dominated by shades of pink. In Russian, there is an expression meaning “to take off your rose-coloured glasses” — to stop seeing the world too optimistically and face reality as it is. I want to do the opposite. I want to keep my rose-coloured glasses on and see the world a little brighter.
For me, pink is not about illusion or denial. It is a conscious choice to notice beauty, tenderness, humour and joy in everyday life. A family dinner, a morning, a child, a flower, a familiar object — things that can seem insignificant until we realise how much of our lives they actually hold.
This is where the title A Reason to Notice comes from. I believe that, to some extent, we shape our reality through what we choose to give our attention to. What we notice, remember and allow ourselves to see gradually becomes the reality we experience.
Through these paintings, I want to create something worth noticing — something that can make a person pause, smile, remember something they love, or simply feel a little better.
I want to believe that love, humour and joy have the power to shape the world. Through my art, I choose to stand on their side.

Stasis is about external stillness and internal movement. It is a state in which we cannot move forward, although everything inside us continues to happen.
The two works, Let the Battle End and Let the Battle Be Won, speak about the internal struggle with our own thoughts and the desire to finally move beyond it.
In nature, nothing truly stops. Everything continues to move, grow and change.

Equality continues the idea of dividing the painting into two parts: a vivid floral image and a simple, saturated background.

Here, the background becomes gold. If in earlier works it represented the social world surrounding us, gold shifts its meaning towards value.
The series is about the idea that every life has value. I want to learn to see each person not through their status, role, or difference, but as something inherently precious.
It is also about recognising the equal value of every living presence.

Metamorphoses is about how we come to understand ourselves through contact with other people and the world around us.

People leave traces within us — they support us, hurt us, and change us. Sometimes, after certain experiences, returning to our previous state is no longer possible.

Like plants, we are constantly interacting with our environment while remaining connected to our own nature.

Joy in Bloom is a series about warm memories that live with us and stay for a long time. It holds a summer morning at a grandmother’s country house, the first day of school, a best friend, first love, a first bouquet. Such moments do not require proof: they simply flare up inside and bring warmth.

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Best regards, Darina