WHO IS ELIZAVETA BEREZINA?
Elizaveta Berezina was born in St. Petersburg in Russia, a city rich in classicism with European influences.
Her parents aimed for Elizaveta to become a ballerina. Although they had to reconsider this as she started early to show her interest in drawing – she would skip her ballet classes to draw and paint everywhere.
She grew up staring at architecture and sculptures saturated with antique culture, and this, as she confirms, led her to graduate at the Imperial Academy of Arts.
“Thanks to my classical education, I can fuse together the legacy of the past, ancient Greek and Roman subjects, with a modern interpretation.”, Elizabeta tells us.
ELIZAVETA’S ARTISTIC VISION AND STYLE
Elizaveta’s paintings are rich in physicality, and her characters underline the importance of human history as a heritage each one of us continuously carries within. Her background in monumental painting – she practiced painting walls of temples and secular premises indeed – gifted her with a unique style build upon interpreting ancient and modern elements together with a research of exquisite forms and ironical content.
“As if everything around us, people and feelings, just came from the Parthenon pediment. Or descended from the walls of the Sistine Chapel.”, she explains.
Beauty – both as starting and reaching point – is the main feature to encounter in her artworks.
“I am driven by a desire to respond to the beauty of the world. Beauty slips through the fingers every moment, and people simply submit to the feeling of non-eternity, non-permanence of existence.”, Elizabeta tells us, to highlight the urgency to stop its disappearance and hold it – an ability owned especially to artists.
The desire to connect the old and the new global view drives her to make art, as she belives how myths, symbols, and patterns used by our ancestors to comprehend the world are closely related to the modern ones.
Elizaveta Berezina mainly works with oil on canvas, although she also appreciates graphic forms. “They cut off the unnecessary elements,” as she explains.
Her approach to art is genuinely personal. She indeed believes how art doesn’t need to follow cultural trends as this won’t allow the artist to free itself.
When painting, Elizaveta merges with the canvas to exploit her vision by meshing her imagination with inspiring content.
In this way, her consciousness well balances her subconscious to create bold images of combined worlds.
INSPIRATION AND FUTURE PROJECTS
Much inspired by the masters of the Italian Renaissance and Late Renaissance (Michelangelo, Tintoretto, and Palladio), as well as by the peculiarity of the Latino feeling of the world – from Diego Velazquez to Dali and Picasso, Elizaveta also mentions few contemporary artists like Banksy, Jan Fabre, and Marina Abramovich.
Being a passionate soul, Elizaveta denies the rational thought of being an artist moved by built concepts or by the mind, as she believes this approach tears away the true expression of the artist itself.
She is instead inspired by any kind of emotional expression from nature to music to life experiences, all filled with the natural flow of human perception. “Replacing life with art is a big mistake, you might end sitting out days and nights in the workshop while life passes by. For me, life and its emotions are always primary. Then, art.”
It comes from here that viewing at Elizaveta’s artworks relates to being a passionate and emotionally driven person.
When asked if she had anything exciting on the horizon, Elizaveta genuinely replies how she wishes to restart living her life entirely after the virus lockdown, to appreciate every moment. She has to complete various projects with the Erarta Gallery in Russia and wishes to fly to the Black Sea soon this summer, where she has a small workshop to paint a large canvas and get further with perceiving her art.
Elizaveta also mentions how being part of st-Art Amsterdam really fulfills her aim of being motivated continuously by a team of professionals.
Her objective in life is to continue doing art, aiming at going more often to Italy, a country she profoundly loves, to gain more inspiration from its art and culture.
