Valeriya Nochovnaya — Artist Statement

For Valeriya Nochovnaya, the painting does not begin with the brush. It begins with the surface. She makes and primes her own canvases, and she treats the preparation of the ground not as a technical preliminary but as the first compositional decision of the work. She judges how much priming to lay down, how coarse or fine the weave should remain, how much oil the surface will drink in or hold at its skin. By the time she stands before a subject, the canvas already carries an argument about how paint will behave on it. Much of what a viewer reads as gesture was in fact settled in advance, back in the studio, with gesso and ground.

This attention to the substrate underwrites a practice that is most alive outdoors and at scale. Working large in the open air, Nochovnaya confronts the central problem of observational painting, which is that the light is always leaving, and she answers it through radical thinning. She dilutes her oils heavily with white spirit until the medium becomes a series of washes so transparent that it behaves less like oil than like watercolour, pooling and staining rather than building. The prepared surface beneath is left to do half the work. Its tooth catches the diluted pigment, and its absorbency decides where colour sinks and where it floats. What results is a deliberate misrecognition. Viewers frequently refuse to believe these are oil paintings at all, and Nochovnaya cultivates that doubt. The delusion, as she calls it, is not a side effect but part of the work's meaning, a quiet demonstration that the identity of a medium lies less in its material than in how it is handled.

Her studio practice runs along a different axis. Indoors, freed from the clock of the sun, the work becomes more imaginative and invented, and it grows willing to depart from the seen. The plein-air paintings, by contrast, are governed by speed, thinness, and trust, trust that the ground laid down hours or days earlier will hold the image up. Between these two registers, the observed and the invented, her practice stages an ongoing inquiry into what painting from life can be when the surface is treated as an active collaborator rather than a neutral support. Her woodland subjects, a sculptural bare trunk, sunlit boulders, the broken green of undergrowth, become less records of a place than evidence of a method. They show paint pushed to its most economical and most precarious state, and a surface prepared to carry exactly that.