Oksana Berzinsh "Reflections of Light - Millennial Pink"

Oksana Berzinsh "Reflections of Light - Millennial Pink" 2020

Painting, Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 48 x 48 inches
Unique
Signed on Recto and Verso

Oksana Berzinsh is a New Jersey–based artist working across representational and abstract painting. Originally trained as an engineer, she brings a structural sensibility to her compositions and studied at the Art Students League of New York under MaryBeth McKenzie, Peter Cox, Ronnie Landfield, and Margaret McCain.

Berzinsh is a recipient of the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club Merit Grant and the Lloyd Sherwood Grant, awarded in support of her abstract series The Reflections of the Light. Her work is held in private and public collections throughout the New York metropolitan area. Influenced by Impressionism, impasto, architecture, and structure, she combines textural brushwork with condensed representational detail to create layered, geometric paintings. Berzinsh also serves on the boards of SOMA Studio Tour, the South Orange Design Review Board, and Creative In Common (CINC), where she helped establish the organization’s public gallery.

Artist Statement 

"My paintings begin with light - how it lands, scatters, and settles into shadow, and what a surface has to do in order to hold it.

I move between representation and abstraction, but the underlying inquiry stays the same. In the figurative work, close observation sits alongside a direct, unhesitating brushwork. In the abstract paintings, that directness becomes the whole subject: layered color, geometric form, and built-up surface do the work that architecture does for light in the physical world - they give it something to move through and against.

The Reflection of the Light took an early cue from ancient glass forms I studied at the British Museum, objects that hold and refract light rather than simply reflect it. Color, shadow, and reflection are treated as interdependent in these paintings, each one legible only in relation to the others. I work with brush and spatula together, so that passages of expressive, textured paint sit right beside areas of quiet, flat color - a relief-like surface built through a steady back-and-forth of adding and stripping away paint until it finds its
own logic.

What I'm after is a modern sensibility that still answers to traditional form - paintings that read as bold and assertive from across a room, and that keep giving up information the closer you look, where gesture, texture, color, and underlying geometry are all part of the same statement about how light behaves." - Oksana Berzinsh