The monumental glow of Istanbul

Olga Serebryanskaya, Russia

Serebryanskaya Olga was born on July 4, 1983. in Bataysk, Russia. Lives in Rostov-on-Don. Since 2018, she has gone from painting clothes and walls to creating paintings. In 2021 graduated from the Aron Honore Academy of Hyperrealism Drawing and now participates in its promotion. “My work is a great journey to my childhood. As a little girl, I dreamed of seeing all the places on our planet, including at cosmic heights near the stars. I remember how, at the age of 6, I stood in the late evenings in the courtyard of a private house, looking at the stars and thought how beautiful the Earth was; wondered how life originated on it and why everything exists. And how at the age of 12, sitting on the windowsill, I looked at the heavy, low clouds and thought that the sky was a deep gray-blue sea. I was one of the children whose consciousness is limited to one city and was worried that life would pass, but everything would remain the same. Having matured, I gained the understanding that now not only the world can be in me, but I can also be everywhere in it, and my travel became an outlet. I managed to see 15 different cultures of our planet, visiting 15 countries, and my wings unfolded to their full potential. But the main event that influenced my work happened in the small town of Malmö in southern Sweden: standing on the embankment and looking at Øresund bridge connecting Denmark with Sweden, I felt a huge flow of energy inside, as if I was in a time machine, moved onto the windowsill into the body of that little Olya - the same deep gray-blue color of the water as the color of that sky. I realized that the Malmö embankment is my “place of power.” There are amazing places on our planet that have incredible energy and can charge a person with it. Each person has their own “place of power”: the foot of a mountain, an alley of a quiet park, a statue of a dilapidated temple, a location in a favorite city... From now on, in each country I look for a “place of power” and create paintings based on travel, depicting places, even just looking at which you can feel warmth in your chest, a surge of energy and joy from the fact that, even as an adult, you can remember your childhood dreams and conquer the world. An important detail in my paintings is silver. This is a reference to the family surname, to the one that I bore as a child, dreaming of travel. It’s also a reference to something a little magical and magical, something that we can’t see or touch, but we can feel inside.”