Artist Marina Rolfe’s parents gave her the opportunity to try music, dance and visual art as a kid.
‘I was pretty bad at music and dance, so art it was,’ Marina says. ‘I’m grateful to my Mum, who took me to art school when I was 6. I had classical art training at a university in Moscow, consisting of painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography.’
She’s since participated several group shows, undertaken a residency at a gallery in Berlin, and had held two solo shows. And all this is before she’s even completed her masters at VCA!
Last year, Marina says she also went through ‘a significant change’ in her art practice.
‘I used to paint figurative works for many years,’ she says. ‘Studying at university and living through the lockdown, spending most of my time by myself, my practice has shifted from being about humans to a more solo experience of being.’
‘At some point, I had a realisation that whatever I meant to express could be expressed without that extra layer of including human figures. It made me feel liberated in those very non-liberating times in lockdown.’
The artist’s new focus draws from the expansive world of landscapes. Organic forms and intuitive brushstrokes come together to create these dreamy, semi-abstract scenes. These places often begin as digital collages from photographs she’s taken, or found images, before translating them onto stretched linen with oil paint.
‘I get inspired by my immediate environment, being in nature, seeing colours and textures, materials and collaboration with them,’ Marina says of her process. ‘For me, the atmospheric feeling of the painting is very important… my process is very intuitive, and things usually change throughout. And sometimes, it changes completely.’
See more of Marina’s work here.
