Anastasia Sitnikova
Hi, my name is Anastasia. I was born in Moscow, Russia. After graduation from the high school, I studied management, marketing and economics. I worked as a journalist in a business magazine, as a public relations specialist and eventually as a marketing manager. When I moved to the U.S., I decided that one major change in the life could open the door for more opportunities. A year ago I started taking fine art and graphic art classes at Harper College. I’m relatively new to art and curious by nature, so I like to explore different styles, techniques and mediums – from representational portraits to abstract patterns, from academic drawing to encaustic and mixed media, from computer graphics to ceramics and sculpture. I enjoy variety – both in the art and in the life, and this reflects in my works.
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An in-depth look at their work:
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This portrait is a pastiche after Peter Paul Rubens. I like this technique, because such combination of charcoal with white and red chalk on toned paper creates an illusion of almost the full color range. As a model for this drawing I chose my son. That evening he had just returned from his winter play outside. His cheeks rosy from the frost, messy hair and overall excited mood perfectly matched this drawing style. The initial drawing was made in one breath; it took me probably a couple of hours. But I returned to it later to correct and work out some facial features that my family members claimed to be not accurate enough.
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The apparent simplicity of this drawing is based on the extreme complexity of the drawing process. In order to find the optimal composition, first I drew 16 fast sketches with different alignment of the elements on the drawing plane. Then I chose one the most successful alignment and made another 5 sketches with smaller variations in shapes, proportions, angles, etc. Then I choose one of the detailed sketches and made a precise drawing, following all the rules of perspective (and slightly adjusting proportions again; and again). I used this final line drawing to experiment with different light conditions and got 4 black and white studies. When I chose the direction of light, I made 8 more studies in color. The final drawing is based on one of them. It’s in color pencils without use of black, which made it challenging to work in shadows. Although the overall drawing strategy may look a little bit excessive, it’s a perfect art therapy for a perfectionist. And yes, I counted all these sketches and studies specially for this review.
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For me road is a symbol of freedom – journey and adventure. At the same time, road signs are the quintessence of order and restriction. In this artwork, the initial shapes of the signs are fragmented and disarranged so that the initial meaning is lost. From the distance the composition reminds the indifferent chaos as that formed by peripheral vision. But closer attention to the details reveals that the elements are put in a new order, suggesting an alternative surrealistic interpretation of the well-known symbols. I used bigger shapes for the forefront elements and smaller typography based pattern for the background to emphasize the three-dimensional quality of the construction. Graphic elements flow over the edges to unite different parts of the composition in one piece. Since I worked with text, I couldn’t help but integrate a short message into this photo collage.
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