ILLUSTRATION BY KATERYNA KYSLITSKA

Blog

First Blog Post

Hello! For the first post I think it would be logical to start from the beginning and introduce myself. My name is Kateryna and was born and bred in Odesa, a historical town by the Black Sea in Southern Ukraine. I was drawing ever since I remember myself and in 99% of the time I was drawing girls in dresses. That made me interested in fashion and for a very long I was dreaming of becoming a fashion designer. There was no decent fashion education available to me when I was finishing school, I didn’t consider art to be a career and didn’t think I had any talent anyway (all the teacher my parents consulted were not impressed with my paintings), I didn’t know anything about design, so we started to look at other things I was good at. Since math and science were definitely not my thing, I chose International Relations as the most exciting field if study: I loved to read, history seemed fascinating, politics - mysterious and they were teaching quite a lot of English which I was studying hard in school. I’ve spent 5 years studying international relations and Arabic language - the latter I never properly learned, unfortunately. But all the other knowledge I’ve got I am using every single day, though I’ve managed to switch into art and design profession after. My first degree helps me to understand and analyse the processes that are going on in the world today (not as well as my group mates who stayed in the industry, of course) and not to follow the emotions of the crowd (though it’s very hard). My personal art doesn’t reflect my interests much because it has always been a therapy for me, the way of stress relief and escapism. I change media and styles when some particular one starts feeling like work and doesn’t do its job to save me from reality. That’s why you can see watercolours, gouache, markers and paper cut outs in my feed lately. If you’d like to join me on a stress relief paint-along workshops, please let me know. I am thinking about filming a demo but I need a reassurance that someone needs it too. 

To be continued on how I finally came to art in the following blog posts.

Kateryna Kyslitska