Natalya Sultanova

NATALYA SULTANOVA

Natalya was born in 1976 in the city of Serov in the Urals where she attended Art School.  In 1993 she went on to study in the graphics department of the Art College in Nizhniy-Tagil, graduating in 1998.  She taught art in a small northern town for 6 months, but then married fellow artist, Yuri Sultanov, and together they moved to St Petersburg.

For 3 years she worked in a stained glass workshop, learning to paint on glass, making glass for restoration projects as well as creating original pieces.  During this time she began to paint in oils professionally, her work being influenced always by the bright colours of her remembered home landscapes and her glasswork.  The Urals is an area of outstanding scenic beauty, as well as containing sparkling minerals such as emeralds and malachite.

She loves the work of Gauguin and the Impressionists and wants her work to bring light and cheerfulness to the viewer rather than portraying the world in the reality of the cold grey colours of a St Petersburg winter.  She travels widely in the countryside and, while she uses her memories for inspiration, she wants her painting to create a new world with its own sense of space, rather than be a direct reflection of what she sees.

She has taken part in exhibitions in Lithuania, Poland, Spain, Britain and France as well as in Russia. Her work is in private collections in Russia, France, Italy, China, Britain and USA.