About Irina Gogiberidze

I am a self-taught artist from Kaluga, Russia. I have been drawing all my life - actually, I had no choice because my head is full of images, and I need to embody them so that they do not overflow. When I find out something interesting (strangers in the street, a flock of birds in the sky, words said by people around, a phrase in a book), I immediately start thinking of how to give flesh to this impression, to turn it into a picture.

The older I get, the more I see and feel, and the more I am able to reflect in art. For me, this is one of the most pleasant parts of being a human – changing, developing, getting more sophisticated, becoming someone more than you were before. So people are often the main subject of my art - along with their beliefs, desires, and passions, from small everyday emotions to fantasies and nightmares.

In general, I work mainly in ink, but have recently realized that it is not enough for me anymore, and some ideas need to be expressed in colour. So at the moment I am experimenting with mixed techniques (e.g. watercolours + ink) and acrylic colours, and am planning to extend the list of course. Nevertheless, ink is still the most comfortable medium for me to work with, and usually the one I use for complicated, challenging concepts.

I do not have a universal “recipe” for creating an artwork, and there is always a lot of spontaneousness in the process – it often happens that I sit at the table having quite a distinctive idea of what I am going to do, and in an hour, I find myself depicting something absolutely different.

What absolutely fascinates me in art is that while I create, it creates me back as well, being a part of my life experience, letting me find out more about myself and seeing more refined details, nuances and shades of the world around me. Thus I become different with every new artwork.