Irina Starjeneckaya

Irina Starjeneckaya is an artist, she is a Member of the Russian academy of Arts.  Irina Starjeneckaya teaches painting.  

I was born in a train at the station in Arys. My mother was returning from the evacuation in Samarkand to Moscow. At first I lived in a drawer of an antique wardrobe with a mirrored door; to this day this wardrobe exists in our house. In my childhood I studied at Gnesins’ Music School, the Bolshoi Theatre Ballet School, but in the end graduated from The Moscow Secondary Art School and later from The Surikov Institute. I have worked as a theatrical decorator and in the area of monumental art, but my main profession is painting. Sun, light, tree, flower and love are essential things for me. For me in art there is incompleteness yet exactness, mobility yet stillness, and all that we cannot explain with words, the irrational. ‘Go there, I do not know where. Find that, I do not know what.’ And if you went and found it, here is your reward. I think that we have many things in common with Dmitry Krymov. An understanding on theatrical art. His theatre of the artist, painted theatre, attract me and amaze me with its improvisation and unpredictability. In Krymov’s teaching  there is so much love. Together with his students he makes discoveries, and I would like to participate in this process. They discover themselves, their possibilities and their individualities.

Starjeneckaya Irina