Flitting from the real world to the imaginary

THE paintings have an ethereal quality, with fantastical costumes and also fairy-tale compositions, but artist Anna Berezovskaya would point out that her paintings were done years before the TV series Games of Thrones.

So yes, she gets the hit series' reference, but the biggest, and only, similarity that she would point out is that she hopes to transport the viewer into another world through her art work.

"My main task is to create my own world and make people believe in it," says the 28-year old Russian.

And what a beautifully constructed world it is through her intricate and detailed oil paintings. For her third solo exhibition at Redsea Gallery, Berezovskaya says that her style and technique are still the same, with more finesse, but this time, her paintings have a stronger sense of symbolism and a greater awareness of her artistic style.

Each painting takes about a month and a half to be completed, but it's the conceptualisation for them that is laborious. Berezovskaya starts with pencil sketches in which she experiments with the composition and then she tries out multiple colour combinations on small canvas sheets before finally painting them onto the actual canvas.

"I start painting them on actual canvases only when I have the complete concept and colour scheme, and I don't change anything once I start," she explains.

With meticulous planning and execution, her canvases are often dominated by symbols from medieval times like knights and armour and women in long gowns, with their hair tied up in elaborate braids (that often resemble tree trunks even). But there are some whimsical touches that remind you she's a contemporary artist, like characters holding Ipads, or wearing Adidas sneakers.

Her style is described as poetic realism, with a blend of the surreal and abstract. Symbolism is heavily employed, and she's inspired by Russian culture and literature.

For example, locks and keys feature prominently in her works, representing mysteries to be unlocked and discoveries to be made. The recurrence of safety pins in her work hark back to an old Russian superstition which claims that wearing an old safety pin will ward off evil.

Berezovskaya's works hint at Russian culture, primarily through the rich costuming and the postcard-like winter scenes she inserts in some of them.

She describes how she's always lived in an imaginative world from young, and that she started drawing from the time she could hold a pencil. She went on to art school, but interestingly, didn't major in painting but in jewellery design instead.

"I think that's one way I developed my patience and attention to detail, especially when I specialised in carving (on bone)," she relates.

Berezovskaya also likes reading autobiographies and has also started collecting and painting portraits of everyone from friends to strangers. She took two years to paint some 40 works for this exhibition in Singapore - her last sell-out show at Redsea Gallery was in 2013. To better understand Singapore, she's also read Lee Kuan Yew's biographies. "I think that's helped me understand Singapore's history and the people more," she concludes.

Edge of the World by Anna Berezovskaya runs from May 15 to June 14 at Redsea Gallery at 9 Dempsey Road. Sketches are priced from S$8,000 and paintings from S$27,000. For more information, please log on to www.redseagallery.com