Kinstler Conversation with Anastasiya Tarasenko
By Maddie Klett
The following is a conversation with New York based painter Anastasiya Tarasenko. This interview took place in January 2022 and has been edited for length and clarity.
Maddie: How did you start i want therefore i am (2021)? Where did the idea come from?
Anastasiya:
I'm trying to remember. I think I started it in the middle of the pandemic in 2020. Nobody knew what was going on. There was no vaccine and no testing. So I was basically locked at home. I didn't have a studio either, because my studio building shut down. I was working in the basement at the time and I think every artist was struggling. In an end-time like that, I was like, “how can I come up with anything?”
Maddie:
It was dark.
Anastasiya:
Man. The dark year. Although this year wasn't much lighter. So I started thinking about things like consumption and greed and power and the baseness of human existence. How we try to escape and run away from the basic principles or instincts of being an animal. But the truth is that's exactly what drives us every single day to eat, sleep, and propagate. But even more pernicious than that is the ability or the desire that's innate in all of us to dominate. It's not unique to any one person to be competitive. It translates to being territorial conquerors and subjugators because we are generally insecure about our position in the world. That insecurity has led to a lot of toxicity and violence all under the guise of “securing resources”. It all comes back to the fact that at the end of the day we're animals. And until we fully understand and accept and respect our animal past and present, I don't think we'll ever truly be able to rein in those impulses.
Maddie:
Speaking of animal instincts, there is some interspecies fornication happening in the painting. How do you think people will react to this work being made into a puzzle given its sexual content? Since jigsaw puzzles are chaste or wholesome objects–at least in the traditional or puritanical sense.
Anastasiya:
A friend once told me that I have enough respect for my audience that I don’t need to hold their hand through my content. It’s just there, take it or leave it, no apologies and no demands.
I operate under the assumption that there is nothing so drastically new about what I depict. Animals have sex, we all know this. We are also saturated with narratives featuring anthropomorphized animals depicting human parables. It is fun to push these narratives into the depraved. It mixes up the context, turning the familiar into something uncomfortable. So I think a puzzle with some obscenity will be a fun time for anyone willing to engage in putting it together.
Maddie:
That’s great. What is the significance of the species you choose to depict? Pigs show up a lot.
Anastasiya:
It started with chickens and pigs, and it goes back to the animal body. A lot of it also has to do with the woman's body, the reproductive body. There's something about being a woman that means we're always being looked at and consumed. I'm reading a book right now called Caliban and the Witch, and there's a lot of talk about that.
Maddie:
Silvia Federici! She talks about how historically, when a woman was accused of being a witch, it was often a financial thing. A widow who came into inheritance or…
Anastasiya:
Anyone who's trying to make a little money on the side.
Maddie:
Right. Any woman who had independence and agency.
Anastasiya:
Like, “How dare you, you must be an evil witch if you're gaining or taking any independence” because a woman by default has no independence. Right?
The themes in that book, and this idea of consumption overwhelmed me for these recent paintings and what I am making next. Every idea has to do with being the animal, eating the animal, the animal eating the animal. There is a painting that I haven't shown yet, of a pig being strung up in a butcher shop.
As I said, there's a way to use animals as stand-ins for people. In my mind if I used people in many of the motifs it would be too much to look at. I’m using animals as metaphors. It has an aura of silliness to it, but the silliness deflects from the gravity. We're already accustomed to pigs being strung up in butcher shops. We're familiar with it. Even for vegetarians and vegans, the image is familiar, if not offensive.
Maddie:
Right. It's familiar but also behind the curtain. We subconsciously know it’s happening.
Anastasiya:
Right. My self-appointed task is, how do I convey hard ideas in silly ways? How do I not take them so seriously that my audience doesn't take it so seriously and thereby is able to interact with the picture a little bit more than they would have otherwise?
Maddie:
You paint a lot of so-called livestock, or animals bred for consumption, as you said. But in i want therefore i am (2021) you have a whale and other underwater creatures. So there is this Noah’s Ark effect, or a menagerie of different animals that wouldn't normally exist together. It is this religious, mythical, almost fantastical imagining that is also known.
Anastasiya:
I love Trenton Doyle Hancock’s work, and he is a visual master of doing that. He has this colorful comic book language, and he makes toys and all these other fun things, but at the heart of it, there are such deep, powerful messages and themes. It is a balance, and striking that balance is tough. Striking the balance between using humor but not overdoing it, or taking myself just seriously enough, is difficult.
Maddie:
When I think of Trenton’s work and of comic books in general, it's this creation of a whole other world where different rules can apply. But the reason it works is because some conventions stay the same. This world-making has to be recognizable, and it needs to be fleshed out. Do your paintings connect? Is there some sort of narrative existing between them?
Anastasiya:
I don't do it on purpose. Rats are a common recurring character for me. So are chickens, dogs, sheep. There's a recurring cast of characters and animals depicted to be observers in the picture. At first they had been observing the people doing whatever they were doing in my paintings, and then in 2021 they took center stage. I zoomed in on the animals and let them shine in this body of work.
To be honest, I am still not sure about where I will take that for this year's paintings. But they are all connected.
Maddie:
I think as an artist, when you are living mentally in your art practice, you need some sort of structure that allows you to get to the next place and start the next project. Whatever that looks like.
Anastasiya:
You're so on target with that. That structure comes in the form of a cast of characters and sometimes it comes in the form of colors, materials, or sizes. It needs different kinds of anchor points to keep a person like me who likes to go above and beyond and travel in space a bit. It keeps me grounded and it is absolutely necessary.
In i want therefore i am (2021), I was struggling at the time, and one of the anchor points that helped me through was the materials. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was frustrated. The world felt like it was burning. But I was anchored to the way that I work, and if I knew nothing else, I know my painting technique and how to make it.
Maddie:
You create cartoonish renderings of the human form. What are your influences for that?
Anastasiya:
Medieval art. They had a very cartoonish way about them, but it was also very specific and quite serious how they depicted people. They didn't care about realism whatsoever. There was no beauty, they depicted an anecdote in the simplest possible terms. I really respect that. You believe them, even though they're extremely cartoonish, you believe what is going on. Again, if I'm dealing with heavy themes and then paint them with a heavy hand, I’d end up with a heavy painting and I'm not a heavy painter per se. So people are always a little goofy for me… which in essence we all are.
Maddie:
I think that’s right, “you believe them.” There's just enough realism to your scenes to be legible.
Anastasiya:
We don't need much. I went to a school that was very figurative focused, or concerned with depicting reality as it exists, and I hated it. I loved it when I got in there because that's my background, extreme photorealism. But as time went on, I hated it. You could see the skills of the artist, but what else was there? I'm all about ideas, for better or worse.
Still, I don't like to take myself too seriously, and I don't like to take other people too seriously. I think at the end of the day, we're making pictures, and what a privilege to be doing that. Everyday that I get away with doing it is a great day.
Maddie:
Speaking of humor or levity, you use a comic strip palette. Why are you drawn to those colors? Your paintings also have a texture on the surface, how are you achieving that?
Anastasiya:
I love primary colors. I can't use the color purple for the life of me…purple doesn't exist in my world. I like blue. I like green. I like red. I'm a simple person. That's my palette. It is largely because that is the kind of art that I love, medieval art, renaissance art, and folk art from all around the world. They tend to use these simple, dominant, bright colors. The color palette for me is inspired by the folky art I grew up looking at as a kid in my house. My parents had a couple of pieces of Russian, Slovic, folk art and little toys. There's a very rich folk art tradition in Slavic countries and a lot of it is in very red and blue dominant palettes.
The texture comes from using oil paint on copper. It is a wood panel that has a piece of copper glued onto it and the copper is not absorbent. It lets the paint sit in a very pleasing way.
Maddie:
Painting on metal is also a big part of the icon tradition in churches, right?
Anastasiya:
There is an awesome tradition and there are a lot of them at the MET (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). They have really small book covers or reliquary boxes or icons that are gilded copper. Over time the gold rubs off and you're left with just copper and enamel. I can't use enamel, it is way too complicated and expensive and the work cannot be very big. But those enamel pieces are absolutely stunning. And again, they use a very similar color palette to what I am using.
My paintings are also not very big. i want therefore i am (2021) is 18 x 24 inches. I'm not a big painter, so texture is a little easier to achieve. And I use a very small brush.
Maddie:
Is it forgiving to work this way?
Anastasiya:
Yes and no. It's very difficult to erase and I don't like to paint in many layers. I paint the main characters first and then I paint the background around them so that I essentially have a little border around each character that shows through a little bit of copper. So the way I work is not forgiving. I just choose the long way around.
Maddie:
So you painted the humans and each animal first and then created the islands around them. So from the start they had this isolated, floating existence.
Anastasiya:
Yes. I started with the humans and then I did the whale, and the arms, and the red and blue text, and the whale spout. Everything else grew around it. So whatever is most forward gets painted first and then I move back.
I cannot work on something that is going to overlap. If I don't do it in the correct order, it doesn't look right. It's a very silly way of working in the sense that I have to pay attention to a lot of different things, but for me it makes sense. And now with my newest body of work, I'm breaking those chains a little bit and I'm breaking my own rules.
Maddie:
Wow. That's exciting. Stressful, I'm sure. But also exciting.
Anastasiya:
Yeah, it is. I think stress is a necessary component to keep artists excited about what they're doing.
Maddie:
What is puzzling you today?
Anastasiya:
Trying to come up with this new body of work! Like I said, I'm reading Caliban and the Witch and I think 2022 is gonna be a lot of witches. How do I approach this subject matter without being too hammy? What is it that I'm trying to do? What is it that I'm trying to say? It is one of those days today that I'm obsessed with thinking about these questions, so they will be recirculating in my mind. Beyond that, everything else in the world is puzzling me at the moment.