Artist’s signature oils are a blend of culture and colors
Portrait by Audrey Goforth
Art, says Olga Dorenko, “is my living.” But it’s more accurate to say it’s her life — and has been since long before she emigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1998. Known today for the vibrant landscapes that The New York Times once called “dizzying and hyper-realistic,” Dorenko has been making art since early childhood and was so enamored with painting that she once, at age 5, used her own hair to make paintbrushes. “I can’t go without painting,” she mentioned to one interviewer. “I can’t control it. I see things everywhere.”
The brilliant palette of her wooded landscapes, mountain views, and floral compositions may lead the first-time viewer to think of acrylics, but Dorenko works mostly in oil and mixes her own colors to achieve her hallmark ethereal ambience. She has frequently cited the influence of Russian landscape artist Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898), whose luminous, intricately detailed forest landscapes are still much admired throughout eastern Europe, and the more recent work of the American illustrator Eyvind Earle (1916-2000), whose delicately rendered natural landscapes found their way as backgrounds into such animated Disney films of the 1960s as Sleeping Beauty and Lady and the Tramp.
Dorenko absorbed much of the former Soviet Union’s abundant natural beauty growing up as the daughter of a Soviet military official, traveling from Uzbekistan, where she was born, as far east as the remote Siberian island of Sakhalin. The exposure to travel and the variety of terrain was reinforced by a creative streak in the family; her father was also a musician, and her mother drew and painted as a hobby. By the time the family had traveled back across the vast expanse of the country to Ukraine, Dorenko had announced her intention to become an artist and was enrolled in Ukraine’s Krivoy Rog Art Institute, where her formal art education took place over five years. It was where she learned the art of mixing and blending colors that would provide the foundation of her later work. But, Dorenko remembers, “we spent a lot of time copying,” and there wasn’t much emphasis on originality.
Students who resisted the formulaic approach were regarded with suspicion, but Dorenko always remembered her mother’s constant encouragement to be different. “You have to find your own style,” the artist now insists, “and start from your own place.”
That place turned out to be the United States, and more specifically Winston-Salem, where Dorenko settled with her son after emigrating from Ukraine. It was, she once remembered, “like landing on the moon,” with several hard years spent finding work cleaning houses while adapting to a completely alien environment. “But the way that I saw myself changed,” she says, “because there were so many more opportunities to experience and to expand my skills.”
She never stopped painting, and soon found commissioned work creating murals for civic projects. Local art shows soon followed, and her reputation blossomed. Ten years after arriving in Winston-Salem, Dorenko was attracted by Asheville’s increasingly prominent arts scene and moved to the mountains in 2008, when she was granted U.S. citizenship. Today, she can claim clients in 20 states, Canada, Germany, and England, many who come to visit her studio in Asheville’s River Arts District. While much of her work is in oil, she also occasionally experiments with gouache, pen and ink, and watercolor.
“I used to take a lot of photographs when I first came to the United States, and would work from them when I painted,” Dorenko recalls. This was the influence of her formalist training in Russia: copying from life. But her later work springs from a more intuitive level, capturing her impressions of her surroundings in a rich palette and intimate detail born of her deep attachment to a changing world.
“Flowers are beautiful on either side of the ocean,” Dorenko once observed, “in any corner of the world. My paintings pursue the everlasting.”
Olga Dorenko, Warehouse Studios, 170 Lyman St. Suite 5, in Asheville’s River Arts District. The RAD Studio Stroll happens Saturday, Nov. 9 and Sunday, Nov. 10, 10am-5pm (riverartsdistrict.com). For more information about the artist, see olgadorenko.com.