campfire oil painting (2024) Painting by Daria Borshch (Idolly)

My creative journey
I was born in Siberia. Since I was a little girl I liked to paint and invent different characters. When I was seven, my mother sent me to art school. Painting, drawing, illustration and art history were taught, but the teaching methods were mean templates, and students' self-expression was suppressed in favor of the same program for everyone. As a participant in a painting competition, I went abroad for the first time, to Bulgaria, where I discovered the existence of alternative art. It was a turning point: in time I realized that I would not be able to develop my artistic abilities in Russia. I started looking for opportunities to study in Europe. In 2014 I moved to the Czech Republic, where I received my Master's degree from the University of West Bohemia in 2021.
At the university I realized that when I paint people I use a lot of details, I try to capture the atmosphere of the painting and the person is unnecessary there, but remains the central character for the viewer. So for the first time, in my bachelor's thesis on Generation Y, I painted a person without a face, without gender, without colour. In the scenes depicted in the painting, everyone can find themselves.
After my son was born, my sense of smell intensified. Everyone told me that baby smell was the most pleasant smell in the world and that I had to inhale it. So I breathed in his top and found that I could see colorful auras, which turned out to be a synesthesia scent. So I drew a series of pictures of the smells during the pandemic.But they were small square abstractions, and I couldn't shake the idea of combining the smells of my surroundings into one image.That's how my four paintings (the grotesque as a mirror of reality) came about.

What do I want to express with my work?
I consider art to be a deeply personal act: the artist must experience what he paints in order to charge the paintings with his own energy. So everyone, without reading the description of the painting, feels a special relationship to it.
I have lived all my life in big cities where contact with nature is quite common. In my paintings, the viewer is not confronted with literal nature, nor with landscapes, not even with the conditioned, but with an abstract background - which expresses feelings, my inner perception of external nature.

• Nationality: CZECHIA
• Date of birth : 1996
• Artistic domains: Works by professional artists,
• Groups: Professional Artist Contemporary Czech Artists