creative crossing

Born on October 24th,1983, in the town Novi Sad, Serbia. Valentina’s interest in art began at an early age. Her entire childhood was spent drawing, illustrating and painting. After finishing elementary school and high school for design she continued her education on faculty for applied arts “Academy of Art Novi Sad” on section graphic design and from year 2008 she is a student on Master studies on same faculty with a major in “book graphic and illustration”.

Artist statement:
I have always had an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life; This appreciation is now very evident in work that I am making. Inspired by the relationship between dreams, natural world and the emptiness of consumer culture, between safe childhood playing to everyday marks of reality I bring and create a new type of creatures in my imaginary world. It is a whole range of characters from the ones in darker corners of the streets of soulless cities to the safe and pure creatures from imagination in my wonderland trying through them to prove that I have never grown up, or at least have never lost touch with my innocent childhood self.

My body of work is built of this melancholy interaction between man-made status symbols and frozen moments of the utopian childhood memories. In my work I often flirt with different typefaces, superimposing pieces of print on top of my illustrations, or using them as part of the drawings. I often use draws in black ink on top of these collages, using all kind of hand written scribbles often, which pull the focus of the work back from the adult world to the realms of childhood. This experimenting with more text and new techniques led me to emerging of very personal style.

The characters i paint may seem like some creatures from another dimension, real but unreal, sometimes very closely connected with childhood, playful and inventive, sometimes abandoned and tragically sad and full of misery. But i think they are simply us, modern society without it’s masks, without the fake presentations that make us acceptable to whatever group we are a part of. Yet the only place where we are truly revealed the way we really are is one from the inside. We all share feelings of fear and loneliness. We all sometimes feel ugly and insecure.

If you examine my work closely, you might come to the realization that my creatures are really kind of self portraits, set in a fantastical landscapes of imaginary world which echoes of her own… a bitter, yet sweetly coated prescription for modern life.