Oxana Zaiats
I've been drawing for as long as I can remember — long before anyone called it anything more than a hobby. Growing up in Minsk, art was something you were quietly good at, not something you trained for seriously; that belonged to other people, other families. So my early education followed a more practical script: a double major in Business Administration and Political Science & International Relations at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, followed by nearly two decades in sales and finance.
Painting kept finding its way back in anyway. After my first son was born, I enrolled in a four-year program at Pera Sanat Okulu, graduating in 2012, and spent the years after in workshops in France and Florence, fitting painting around a full career. In 2017, I finally gave it the time it had been asking for: four years of full-time, classical training at the Barcelona Academy of Art.
That training met something unexpected. My classmates were young, and freer with their technique than I knew how to be — years of a rigorous, almost Soviet formal education, then life, then time itself, all make "going wild" a harder thing to learn than discipline ever was. What I paint now lives in that friction: a face splitting along a seam underwater, paint running down a portrait like rain, control and its breaking point in the same frame.
I live and work between Spain and Turkey.
