ANNA ZARNITSKY

ARTIST

President of the Israeli Professional Artists Association

Anna Zarnitsky paintings are in more than thirty Museums around the world

“I take two opposed colors, and when they are coming in touch within one tone, there happens a blending resembling a crown created by light beam”.

The works of Anna Zarnitsky are variable and there is no need to search for the common factor in them. However, there is something that unites them in terms of their wholeness and original creative individuality. This is the feeling of the artist’s internal freedom, an openness of thoughts, feeling and imagination, and the free creative fantasy. Anna creates the fantastic reality that is self-sufficient but open to those who feel the same. It is not easy to enter her complicated spiritual world, but it is even more difficult to get released from the magic of its images, energy of colors and plastics. Only when you get familiar with this world and accept the rules of the game dictated by the artist you will be able to feel romantic and poetic philosophy of Anna Zarnitsky. It turns the reality into the fairy where everything is possible: joy and sorrow, surrealistic visions and traces of ancient civilizations, intuitive insight and universal spiritual and aesthetic values.

Anna Zarnitsky grew up and studied in Irkutsk. She was probably influenced by Siberia in her feeling of vast spaces, a large scale of ideas and completeness of characters. She also graduated from the academic school of drawing at the University of Arts in Moscow.  In Israel, she came in touch with the innovations of the world arts of the last century and indirect associations, plastic metaphors, and allegories that are inseparable from sharp observation, whereas her theoretic concepts are linked to the worries and cataclysms of today. Going through fantastic situations and the combination of impossible we reach the universal paradigm of creativity – the real artistic feeling of a whole and its parts.

Anna Zarnitsky is active both in creativity and in public activities: In 2012 she was awarded the diploma of the International Academy of Sciences, Education, Industry and Art, USA, California (for the preservation of cultural heritage). At present, she is the President of the Israeli Professional Artists Association. Head of more than 30 Art Exhibitions and Arts Festivals in Israel and abroad. Anna Zarnitsky is a mature artist who is able to master all expressive means, such as picture, composition, and color. She is an artist with her own original worldview

She does not repeat the subjects that she likes, and her creative impulses are unexpected and unpredictable, though she always aspires to reach the final goal. Overcoming the “gravity” of truth-loving doctrine that she learned in her youth, Anna builds her strange world by her own laws. Her surrealistic mirages make us shudder, but the purifying catharsis creates the poetic harmony of birds and flowers, of visible and invisible. Anna does not avoid the dramatic collisions beginning. Anna has an emotional personality, though sometimes constrained by the creative and artistic discipline. Separating herself from everyday life Anna faces her viewers who expect from her not the idyllic pictures but the food for feeling and thoughts.

One of the prevailing components of the artist’s gift is her emotional color gamma compelling to believe in the real entity of any artistic image.

“For me, painting is the expression of my intuitive sensation of color and of knowledge related to the concept of color studied in the Moscow country-cottage Senezh”, says Anna Zarnitsky. “In 1950-is in France, a trend of optical art appeared with its complex color combinations resulting in an unexpected effect which corresponds to my color sensations. The founder of the trend was Victor Vasarely (who worked in France from 1930 till 1997). Vazareli developed a system of optical principles for color distribution on the canvas. His searches inspired me when I studied in Moscow. Today I do many things of my own. I take two opposite colors and light them up. When two different colors come in touch within one tone, there happens a simultaneous merging resembling an aura created by light beams. In painting, it always happens on the cognitive-subconscious verge.”

The visual effect is that the observer feels by intuition the proposed motif assuming the appearance of presentiment, conjecture. Then it becomes apprehension, understanding, undergoing variations, interpretations, generalizations, and being incorporated in the dynamic figurative, in fluctuating and unusual images characteristic of modernism. This aesthetic conventional world is diverse. Here all the images, people and animals, are artistically equal. Here Torah is celebrated by dance on the sunset background, and expressiveness of the dance can send whirling the entire Universe. Here Sabbatical candles are piously lit. And here the velvety camels are pacing, bright bulls are abiding, bewitched peacocks are screaming, silvery queer fish are shining. Here Amazon is abiding with graceful Capricorn. Here the aristocrat prophetess foretells the fate. Here a young violinist girl and a golden-haired maiden with a mandolin in her hands, as if coming from the times of the Italian Quattrocento. Some of the images move from canvas to canvas. Sometimes these are accompanying attributes or favorite images, which come from close-up positions on previous canvases and become expressive components on the new ones, as, for instance, crimson pomegranates or bully dandy cocks always finding a reason for combat. But each time they appear anew, found out anew, though recognized for their color preferences.

The paintings of Anna Zarnitsky are thematically conditional, modern in their stylistics, where modernism of the first third of the 20th century is enriched with an up-to-date sensation of the objective world and the abstract conditionality. The world created by the artist is attracting, exciting, discovering the best of the human emotions, carried away by its festive color saturation, its capability of renovation and creation, its aesthetic aspiration for harmony. Creations of Anna Zarmitsky introduce the spectator to the mythological-theatrical realm rich of content, to associations and images full of life. Her creations render the sense of entering into a vast space, into a total scene causing the spectator to feel as if time stood still, and he is observing the moment which will never pass away.

The occurrences taking place in her creations are usually dramatic, and at the same time, the feeling transmitted to the spectator is that of romantic optimism echoing classic art. Anna created a new interpretation and combined distortion of vision with strong colors and created a peculiar style transferring to the spectator a feeling of aspiration to harmony. In her paintings, Anna Zarnitsky refers to images of real, mythological and Biblical fauna – peacock, crawfish, cock, fish, a winged bull, which attracted many artists throughout ages. During centuries these animals became universal archetypes which were allotted with intricate meanings used in astrologic, alchemic, religious symbolism and became an integral part of canon images.

Thus, the peacock embodied beauty and immortality, in early Christianity, this image was related to the symbol of the sun; the cock meant dawn, awakening, and vigilance; fish in Christianity symbolized Christ and served a zodiac sign. Many Biblical stories connected with fish are quite symbolic. For instance, the story of Jonah, swallowed by “a big fish” and thrown out safe and sound three days later, symbolizes resurrection. The bull embodied vital force and male power in different cultures. The iconography of a fantastic winged bull with a human face, as depicted on the canvas of Zarnitsky, descends from sculptures of Šedu in the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon the Second in Dur-Sharrukin. The winged bull is mentioned in visions of Ezekiel and of John the Apostle in the Apocalypse, and it became the symbol of Luke the Evangelist. It also arouses allusions related to the image of the death-dealing bull of Picasso’s surrealistic painting “Guernica”.

The visual-plastic interpretation of animals in art and the associations connected with their semantics have undergone changes in the course of centuries. In the course of time, the symbolic sense gradually fell back to the background, and beauty of form, color, line, rhythm became of primary importance for artists. V. Kandinsky wrote in his book “About the Spiritual in Art”: “In our times we are still tightly connected with the external nature, and we are obliged to derive from it our forms. The actual question of the present is how should we act, which means, to what extent are we free to change these forms, and what are the colors we can use to join them?”

Anna Zarnitsky in her canvases transforms the motifs of fauna into images of the fantastic world by expressive plastic means. In some of these canvases she underlines the visible plastic authenticity of the image, in some of them it is the linear graphic touch of the form marked out, and in some others, it is the dynamic, vibrating space accentuated. Her works as if the eradiate energy of pure color action. The paintings convey an intensive piercingly gaudy color, and the effect is achieved by comparison of pairs of additional contrasting pure colors – red and green, orange and violet, yellow and blue, as well as by acute rhythm, by dab dynamics.