Kuz | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

Yulia Kuznetsova alias Kuz, was born in Russia in 1985. Gifted for drawing since her childhood, she decides to fully develop herself and chooses to dedicate herself entirely to her art. At the age of 21, she went to the city of Yaroslavl to study art. Kuz began her career by joining the studio of Efremova Andreya. She stayed there for three years before entering the Faculty of Art and Crafts and then the Faculty of Fine Arts. There, she discovered the Itinerant School, a Russian pictorial movement of the 19th century advocating painting in the open air and celebrating the great Slavic spaces; their forests, their fields and their meadows. Kuz was greatly influenced by its members (notably Levitan, Shishkin and Savrasov). From that moment on, the artist will strive to transcribe nature in all its splendor and to interpret its diversity. \Before tackling each canvas, Kuz sits in the open air and draws the landscape before his eyes, associating a mood, a story or a theme. The artist always perfects her study with oil paint on cardboard. She then brings her drafts back to her studio and extracts the essence of her final painting. Her paintings are meant to be realistic. However, like Picasso (Spanish painter of the XXth century) she thinks that "everything that can be imagined is real". This definition of reality leads her to interpret her landscapes with great artistic freedom, especially in terms of color. For her, the work is only complete when the balance of colors is reached. To her classical technique, she adds the technique of glazing. With the help of transparent resin, the artist works her colors and creates depth effects. \nKuz wishes to reveal to the spectator these small corners of preserved nature on which his glance is posed. Each of her paintings awakens our senses and transports us into the peaceful atmosphere of a winter morning or a summer evening. Indeed, she particularly likes to paint at sunrise and sunset to capture the paleness or the incandescence of the light. She works meticulously with the sky and the clouds, in her eyes symbols of life and freedom. "Their changing moods perfectly transcribe the feelings and emotions of the soul," she says. \When she's not painting, Kuz spends her time enriching her creativity. She reads Zola's "The Work", Irving Stone's "The Passionate Life of Van Gogh", Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece" or visits the Louvre, whose countless paintings constantly feed her imagination.