My name is Natalia Kalianova, though many in the art world know me as Kalina. I am a contemporary painter born in Russia and currently living and working in New York.
My art is based in life itself, in direct observation, lived experience, and attention to authentic moments. I am inspired by real encounters, by people as they are, by their emotional feelings, vulnerability, stillness, and inner movement. I am drawn to fleeting situations, gestures, pauses, fragments seen while traveling, and moments that exist briefly and then disappear. These lived impressions become the emotional source of my work.
My painting practice develops in two parallel directions, abstract landscape and figurative painting. Despite their formal differences, both are united by a shared interest in psychological states and the emotional perception of space. They exist alongside one another and complement each other, allowing me to explore the same inner conditions either through space or through the figure.
In my figurative work, I am not interested in portrait likeness, but in inner state, vulnerability, and the relationship between the figure and its surrounding environment. Even here, color and painterly gesture remain decisive elements, guiding form according to the emotional logic of the image.
My artistic path began with pop art. I painted people who were bright, energetic, and expressive. I was interested in capturing the movement of the external world, the rhythm of the city, and instantaneous emotion. Over time, however, I felt that this visual language no longer spoke for me.
I gradually shifted from portrait to space. Landscape became a new way of speaking with the world, quieter but deeper. I am not interested in depicting nature literally, but in conveying its breath, the vibration of light, and the sensation of time. For me, landscape is not a background but a reflection of the inner world.
By nature, I am an introvert, and painting has become my primary language. I am interested in states of solitude, suspension, motion, and silence, moments in which the external world meets the internal.
I work primarily with oil on canvas, using wide brushstrokes and layered application, allowing the hand to move faster than thought. This process contains improvisation, freedom, and honesty. Each brushstroke records not an object but a sensation, cold, light, wind, or stillness. I search in painting not for form, but for space for feeling. Color remains my central instrument. I experience it as emotion and structure rather than decoration. What was once brightness has deepened into resonance. Not a shout, but a tone. Not a flash, but a breath.
My academic background in painting provided a strong professional foundation, which I consciously transformed into a contemporary visual language. Landscapes, houses, harbors, and figures in my work function not as depictions of place or narrative, but as carriers of internal experience.
My painting is not directed toward storytelling, but toward experience. I seek to create spaces for a slowed gaze and an inner dialogue between the viewer and the image, where a painting becomes not an object, but a state.
