Artwork by Olga Pudelko
olgapudelko.art
I am a 24 year old Belarusian National, formerly a Customs Officer, and now live in Rzeszow, Poland with my Polish husband. The first time I was inspired by art was at my university. There, I saw many different styles from Belarusian Artists. I wanted to look at those paintings and find my artwork among them. Since my childhood I had painted regularly, but until this time it was only a hobby.
I began searching for something artistic, something special for myself.
Later, living in Poland, I found that special kind of art. I’ve understood that I appreciate the Old Masters’ techniques and am striving to learn those techniques and mix them with my own style. I most enjoy painting with Egg Tempera, which I first used when learning to paint Icons, but the technique I most often paint with uses layers of Acrylic, Tempera and Oil colors. With this technique I begin with a dark background and use sandpaper to pull out the light while using the color to form the subjects of my paintings.
Art plays many roles in my life. I use it to recreate the beauty of places that I have been or of images I have imagined. I often feel that I extract textural beauty from the darkly-grounded canvases I usually work with, like pulling light out of an often dark world. It also takes a religious role, as I use it to paint Orthodox Christian Icons for myself and my community.
My artistic challenges are often finding the right areas to place light and darkness in my paintings, and ensuring that my work is dimensionally correct. Knowing where to put subtle, detailed strokes is also an area where I need more training. I have had a few months of lessons with which I was able to bring my artwork to the stage in which it is currently found, but I know I need more to fortify my talent. In art I want to learn how to combine the real with the imaginatory, with what’s in my mind, as we all form pictures of objects, people and places in our minds, and for this I know I need more training in recreating the real.
Old Masters Academy looks to be one of the few remaining places in the West where traditional beauty is still appreciated and preserved through its work and its teachings. This appreciation was not yet lost in the East when I moved from there, and I hope it is not yet lost in the West. If it is, then I strive to bring this appreciation of traditional beauty back into the minds of the West. This work is difficult, it takes time, patience and attention to detail, but the end result is far superior to what is often seen in modern galleries.
For this reason I want to win the Old Masters Academy course, so that I can have more of the necessary training to create the same type of artwork that I see in galleries of paintings from before the mid-20th century, and that I hope to see more in modern galleries as I and others of a similar mindset embark on our artistic careers.
I believe people should vote for me because I am working to restore traditional beauty to all our lives, so that when one looks at artwork in a modern gallery or even on the internet, there is a greater chance they will see my artwork, the work they implicitly voted for, or the artwork of others inspired by my creations.
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