Lana Svirezheva

Deciding to be an artist at the age of four, while looking up at Sodoma's St. Sebastian, during my first visit to the Uffizzi Gallery, I have since pursued this path by experimenting widely to figure out what kind of art practice I want to embody. 

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Informed by my classical training at the Florence Academy of Art and a Masters by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices, my work combines craft and concept. Each painting or drawing is carefully planned in terms of its materiality: I use lightfast pigments on stable surfaces and work with trusted printers to produce archival giclée prints. Drawing lies at the center of my practice, both in my own work and in my teaching.

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Working from memory has become an important method in my practice. With far from photographic recollections, I draw my way toward figures I once encountered—a homeless woman massaging her foot, a boy’s double chin and toothy grin, a whippet’s slender head slipping out of its collar. These images often balance the socially critical with the whimsical: the comic, after all, can make the tragic easier to face.

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Alongside this work, I am increasingly developing a form of illustration that combines drawing and storytelling while remaining rooted in a fine-art sensibility, allowing me to share my work with a wider public while creating immersive narrative worlds that speak to the deeply human need for stories.