Twelve new oil paintings about the human desire for connection
Squirming cats and puffed up chickens, barely tolerating grasping toddlers’ arms are just hilarious to me.
Or as my artist friend Melissa put it:
🐱 + 👶 = 😾
😹
I kept thinking about this childish desire to squeeze something soft and cuddly as close as possible to soothe our anxieties and feel ok.
It’s been that kind of year when fine feathered and furry companions are even a greater source of solace and comfort that usual.
But as you can see, not all of these Sweet Creatures are delighted by their human’s tight embrace. And while a grumpy cat or an about-to-run-away chicken are pretty funny, I kept thinking about our sense of entitlement toward these creatures.
We expect their love, or at the very least compliance, just because they are around. So I wanted to capture soft and cuddly things in the moments when they express their contrary desires and have as much agency and willful presence as their grasping humans.
THE FAMOUS ZORN PALETTE AND SOME CHEATING
I have always been a great admirer of Anders Zorn, a celebrated Swedish portrait painter who supposedly used just a few paint colors to create his masterful portraits. The so-called “Zorn Palette” is much debated in terms of its historical accuracy and might very well be a later invention by overeager art researchers and painters who tried to emulate his rich tones and distinct depiction of light and shadow.
What is known nowadays as the Zorn palette is deceptively limited and delightful rich.
It uses only 4 paint colors:
cadmium red light
Yellow ochre
Ivory black
Titanium white
If you are familiar with my work, you know that a lot of my figures end up in large open spaces with a deep horizon and a lot of sky. Using red, yellow, white and black creates a serious challenge for painting sky and even the landscape. Sure, I could have given all my subjects lead grey sky with hints of a rose pink sunset or a sickly greenish light of a tornado, but that was not the mood I was going for.
Painting people and animals using these limited colors, I knew that they will have a muted, traditional realist painting quality, and I wanted to contrast that somewhat somber mood with at least a nice bright blue sky. So that’s where I broke the rules and added some ultramarine blue, but only to the sky and nowhere else.
But Tatyana, you say, that painting in the video above has some seriously contemporary neon yellow that simply cannot be ochre! And you are right.
I broke my own rules yet again:
I used saturated transparent color to tint my canvases before painting. And as the series progressed, my marks got looser and more of that initial underpainting started showing through. The painting above is one of the last ones I completed, and it shows plenty of that bright glowing yellow underneath.
The contrast between traditional realism and bright contemporary color that disrupts the image has been fascinating me for some time now, and I am pretty happy with how this particular painting turned out. I plan on making quite a few more keeping this effect in mind.
Quite a few of the images I used as a starting point for this series came from social media contacts, friends and fans. It’s been a wonderful experience to talk to folks about their favorite creatures, and I feel honored to have their permission to make their memories into paintings.
I did take a lot of liberties with the images: while depicting the creatures faithfully and exactly according to my source material, I often took liberties with their human companions. Some of them transformed from adults into children. Some changed clothes, hairstyles and body positions.
This was risky and unfamiliar territory for me, because while I always deviate from my photo sources significantly, I usually stay pretty true to the general shape of the figures to keep them believable and solidly embodied. I would be super curious to see if you can guess which humans in these pictures were completely made up and which are just slightly altered :)
Another fun and simultaneously challenging and freeing part of this work was creating a series with a strong yet simple concept. It’s been a really long time since I’ve made such a cohesive body of work. And possibly the first time I ever stayed this consistent in terms of palette choice, general composition and really focused and clear subject matter.
I was concerned that it would end up feeling limiting, or I would get bored with it super fast. But instead I was rewarded with interesting new ideas and discoveries that came directly as a result of creating a set of pretty strict rules from the start.
This was a great learning experience and I am already planning the next series that will look very different from this one, yet will be very much informed by the process of creating the Sweet Creatures.
Starting with this series I will be making my paintings available for purchase to my subscribers first. So wether you are interested in one of these paintings or any future works, sign up to for priority access today