I am Tatyana Ostapenko, a muralist and painter of resilient babushkas, Barbies, vast landscapes and squirming cats.
If you’ve been in SE Portland recently, you may have walked past my mural, The Real Strong and Silent Types.
You might have even painted with me in my studio or on Zoom.
Or maybe you Googled “feminist Ukrainian-American artist” to end up on this site. No matter how it happened, I am glad you are here.
I wanted to be a painter for as long as I remember,
but I didn’t make my first painting until well into my 30s.
Growing up in the tumultuous times after the collapse of the USSR, most of us were concerned with staying fed and keeping the lights on. In the social and economic inheritance of a failed utopia, art seemed like a frivolous and far away pursuit.
After immigrating to the US in the late 90s, I did all kinds of things that weren’t art: traded futures, bought cars at an auction, sold band merch and interpreted from Russian to English and back. And after a decade and a half of all this adulting I finally allowed myself the luxury of my adolescent dream: I went to art school.
I received my BFA in 2015 and since then I have been selling my paintings and exhibiting around the Pacific Northwest as well as in NYC, Ukraine and S.Korea.
In the summer of 2019 I quit my office job and became a full time artist and never looked back!
I’ve been called a visual storyteller.
There is definitely a narrative element to my paintings, however I mainly focus on conveying a sense of particular time and place.
My work is driven by my formative years in the USSR and post-soviet Ukraine.
The collective and personal trauma of immense economic, societal and political changes and uncertainty have been the fueling my art practice. My paintings are in equal measure a wistful childhood memory and critical inquiry into the recent history of former Soviet Union and the daily lives of people who will never make it to the official historical records.
My work has been exhibited around the world at the 5th Geoje International Art Festival (South Korea), Odessa Contemporary Art Biennial (Odessa, Ukraine), the Governors Island Art Fair (NYC),Cape Cod Art Museum (Dennis, MA), Littman Gallery (Portland, OR) Locker 50b (Richmond, VA) and Site: Brooklyn (NY, NY) and other local and national venues. See full CV here.
When I’m not painting you can find me picking chanterelles in the mossy woods of the Pacific Northwest, listening to neuroscience and economics podcasts, or planning my next trip to Ukraine.