My name is Karina. I am an artist born in Moscow and currently living and working in Vancouver, Canada.
Drawing was one of my favorite things to do as a child. I could spend hours immersed in it, and in middle school I even won second place in a drawing competition. But my life eventually took a different path, and for many years, art almost completely disappeared from it.
At 27, I moved from Moscow to Israel. Around the age of 30, after my divorce, I picked up a brush again. For several months, I felt as though I were rediscovering painting — the relationship between brush, paint, and canvas, the fundamentals I had once learned, and that familiar sense of warmth and calm I remembered from childhood.
In 2019, I began painting again, and from that moment, art gradually became a permanent part of my life. In many ways, it felt like a return to myself — to something that had always been close to me and gave me a sense of an inner home. In 2023, I moved to Canada, where I live and work today.
My first degree is in journalism, and in recent years I have worked extensively with human psychology, systemic dynamics, and the exploration of recurring patterns. This experience has deeply influenced the way I see people and what I search for through art.
What exists inside a person? What shapes their sense of self? What within them becomes a source of strength, and what remains vulnerable? What images, fears, memories, and recurring stories live somewhere on the border between the conscious and the unconscious?
I work primarily with acrylics, combining elements of symbolism and surrealism. I am interested in making visible what cannot be seen with the eyes: a person’s inner world, strength, vulnerability, experiences, recurring patterns, and the images that exist somewhere between the conscious and unconscious.
But perhaps what interests me most is the person themselves. I am drawn to looking beyond the external image and discovering something deeply personal, alive, and real — something that deserves not only to be seen, but to remain close.
At the end of 2025, this exploration evolved into Inner Eye, the project that is now at the center of my artistic practice.
I call these works portraits of the inner world.
In them, a person’s real eye is combined with their totem animal, elements of nature, symbols, and runes. These are not portraits of physical appearance. I am far more interested in trying to see what exists within a person, to feel their individuality, and to translate it into the language of painting.
I want each painting to become something deeply personal. Not simply a work of art that enters someone’s home, but something intimate — something their eyes return to, something whose presence brings a little more warmth into the space.
I believe a painting can be more than a beautiful object on a wall. It can become a personal symbol, a source of support, and a reminder of something a person once saw and understood about themselves.
And perhaps this is why, for me, art is also a form of love: a way of seeing a person more deeply, carefully gathering their inner world into an image, and creating something that can remain beside them for years to come.