“I’m an artist… because it’s self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full,” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1882. “It’s the very opposite of saying: ‘I know all about it, I’ve already found it.’ As far as I am concerned, the word means, ‘I am looking, I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved.”
When Eugenie Vronskaya was given her first solo exhibition at London’s Boundary Gallery in 1989, she was so fearless she painted with both hands. “I knew little, but what I knew I knew really well.” Now she understands what van Gogh meant. “Being older, knowing more, I find it’s corrupting: it’s so much more interesting to me to venture somewhere I’ve never been before.”
Vronskaya’s career has been a succession of ventures into new territory. Initially trained as an icon painter, then put through eight years of academic art teaching in Moscow, since her arrival in this country 30 years ago she has established herself as a painter of portraits, still lifes and, in her 2015 Nightwalker exhibition at John Martin, magic realist nocturnes. But when a subject comes too easily, she finds herself thinking: “If this is it, just painting this, it’s not enough.”
Eugenie Vronskaya describes her painting technique as ‘drawing with colour’. Through the movement and physicality of her medium, she seeks to express her emotional response to her subject, rather than to imitate reality. Often, she’ll focus on a central image—a horse, a tree, a figure—which she then flattens, borrowing from her knowledge of icon painting. She says: ‘I work with form and space, abstracting and simplifying in order to reveal the metaphysical dimension and to communicate something about my own inner life’.
The resulting works have a meditative, otherworldly quality. Vronskaya describes them as ‘autobiographical, but not in a documentary sense—rather as the emotional and spiritual response to my environment. The Scottish Highlands, where I have lived since 1998, have had the biggest impact on my life and work. Riding or walking alone in the wilds, swimming in lochs and rivers in the rain, seeing the sunlit midsummer nights and hearing the primal
