Ekaterina Smirnova: The Travelling Artist

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Ekaterina Smirnova is an artist capable of awing her audience with watercolor paintings that make you want to travel. Travelling, in this case, is intended as a movement from one space to another, but also as journeys outside and inside a person.

Journey of discovery and, especially, of yourself. Occasions to find yourself and change, to understand yourself better and grow from it.

That's the view of Smirnova, a Siberian artist living in Brooklyn. To her, travelling means freedom: having no boundaries.

But also meeting new people, hearing new sounds, new smells and through all of this creating inside yourself a renewed memory, more complex, capable of changing you.

In her big, hypnotic and deeply atmospheric watercolor paintings, she chose her travelling destinations: Salzburg with its light fog and enchanted lure, Beijing with the constant fluttering patina of mist, Miami with the lukewarm raining, New York with the tops of the skyscrapers concealed by the clouds.

And then Novosibirsk - the city where she was born - with its twenty different types of snow.

When she travels, Ekaterina always has a camera and watercolors with her. Her art often starts with an emotion, from a note taken on the spot, even though the elaborate technique and dimension of her paintings require a lot of work in her studio.

She chose watercolor over every other medium because it's what she finds most capable of reproducing the real scene, with accuracy being her favorite element: water, fog, snow, rain or mist.

Smirnova uses big and rough brushes and works on overlapping layers, scratching and sketching the canvas, mixing a sophisticated way of drawing with an instinctive gestural art, to the actual and proper dripping. Giant works charged with incredibly suggestive atmosphere.

Her paintings are landscapes to the limits of the abstract, caught in the haze of dawn or in the shadows of sunset. Images that can easily be the archetype of metropolis, emblems of a planet now made of big urban conglomerates, with their streets lost in the fog at the horizon, on which the lights of the traffic flicker.

Metropolitan visions in which the dripping of colors on the canvas overlays the uprightness of buildings in a symphony of slow rhythms.

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