Brilliant Career Advice by a fresh Art Student, Tatiana Savchenko, Immigrant from Russia
Interview
by Galina Kovshilovsky
https://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/317779-tatiana-savchenko
Q1: What’s been your most rewarding moment as art student? Your most challenging?
Tatiana: It is very useful to be in the creative environment. It can be art students or artists society. They are just like you who are hungry for experiments, discovery, and creativity. This is a beneficial and nutritious environment. You see different styles, drawing techniques, you see how people create what they do, why they do, talk, ask, share your ideas and experiences. Another rewarded moment it is professors. I had the wonderful CSUN professors. One of them is Samantha Fields, who is a professional artist and a very generous person. She graduated from a private university, majored in art and art history. She is a storehouse of knowledge. She moved me forward and shaped me as contemporary artist. Another useful thing, there is summer art program for students for CSU system. I participated in the CSUMB. It was in Monterey Bay. We had 6 professional artists and a delegation of students from the Italian Academy of Arts. Every day we had feedback from professionals, round tables, exchange of experience, and painted 8 hours per day.
Challenge was difficult to read hundreds of pages on the history of art in English and write research papers, since English is my non-native language. However, it helped me to significantly advance my English and understanding the history of art, how everything started and where different ideas and trends came from.
Q2: What do you do to engage your audience?
Tatiana: I have several channels of social media: FB, Instagram, YouTube, etc., where I share my work with my friends and publish my work. Also, university connections work just as well. I often go to galleries, museums, to open exhibitions and get to know people. In May 2017 I won the international contest among international abstract artists on the Artslant site. Now they are advertising and selling my work through Amazon.
Q3: What are some of your productivity hacks or ways that you manage your time?
Tatiana: I need time to accumulate material, to comprehend what I'm doing, to understand the color scheme, to see something beautiful and then I can draw several pictures at once. Be sure to be in a harmonious state. I checked many times, if it is tense, something does not work.
And sometimes I like to stand on the beach and see what the life of the river brings to me. I look at the FB pages, news channels and watch what attracts my attention. I pay more attention to the visual series.
I also like to watch the work of other artists. I noticed that those artists and works that attracted me they have something relative my style. And it's like a puzzle. The same time, it's another way to find yourself and your path, because it's very important to understand what was created before you. Then, you can develop some direction or say your word in art, but before you have to be in the topic of the contemporary conversation
Q4: Any advice for new art students?
Tatiana: My advice is listen carefully to your teachers and perform all that they say. It can be small, obvious things, like walking every week to a museum or a gallery, drawing every day, but they have a huge effect if you start doing it. And you'll never understand why they advise you this, if you do not do it. For those who masters the art independently, you can read interviews with artists, go public conversations with them, ask questions and follow their advices.
Q5: Where do you like create the most?
Tatiana: Interestingly, ideas always come and go. I like to do walking tours in the morning, to notice the beautiful usual things around me. For example, a fallen leaf with beautiful coloring, a spilled paint on the asphalt, a bicycle on the fence. I take a photo, then I look and comprehend what attracted my attention. I do not yet have my own studio, so I feel equally good at drawing houses or studios with other artists. Although, I should be noted that in the studio we have more working atmosphere.
Q6: What is next?
Tatiana: The next stage is to make a series of new paintings every year, show them to the world, conduct a dialogue with people and the art community. I plane exhibited in Los Angeles in other cities of America, then or at the same time to enter European galleries, Asia and the Middle East. I will plane publish my work in magazines, read lectures at different universities around the world. One more idea is to help young artists find their own style. It will be interesting to teach adults and children to abstract art. I want to talking with people through my paintings about what is happening in the world, how we change and grow, as individuals, bring beauty through art to every home. After all, artists are little wizards, they simultaneously feel the past, the present, and the future subtly. Therefore, they can create new future and models more harmoniously in their paintings.
Q6: What was your first art piece?
Tatiana: Although I seriously began to work as an artist in adulthood, I had a craving for art since my childhood. I had a carpet with a picture of Shishkin's painting "In the Forest", on which there are three bears. Then, I loved to look at the walls before falling to sleep and in the cracks my imagination kept drawing me fanciful pictures all the time. At school in drawing lessons, I could not draw well, and my mother helped me to gently shade my work, because the teacher required accuracy, but I all the time created expressive drawings. I drew my own home and the portraits in the pencil were very similar. Then, in my senior classes, there was an attempt to go to an art school. At school, the paper that was given out for drawing was substandard, the watercolor flowed and washed the whole picture. The second attempt was in adulthood and it also failed. I did not like drawing pencils for three hours with cubes and prisms. And much later in a private lesson, one artist drew attention to how I feel the color well. And then I realized that I need to work in color, then I went to oil and acrylic. And here in America, my college teacher helped me notice that I'm strong in abstract art. And the first abstract picture I made, I keep, like the base, as the starting point of my art.
Q7: Are you happy? What makes you joyful and passionate to art?
Tatiana: Drawing for me is always a joy. You create a new and it's beautiful, interesting. You always get joy, because you show others, discuss with them their work, make others happy. Once I dreamed, draw at least one picture for my house. And now my whole house is hung in my paintings. It's just wonderful. Sometimes I outweigh the pictures, create different combinations and exhibitions. When I come to my friend’s houses and my paintings in their homes, this makes me happy twice, because you help to make someone's life happier.
...till next time