Featured Artist – Iryna Kharina

RUSART is starting series of articles about Canadian artists, who belong to RUSART’s community: either as a client, customer, colleague, or as a supporter.  This time we’re featuring Iryna Kharina, who came to RUSART in 2015.

Meet Iryna Kharina

Iryna is a professional artist and art instructor from Ukraine, now residing  and working in BC, Canada. She is a third-generation artist. And she started her first art steps with attempts to embody imagination when she was just a three-year-old child. She was following her mom’s and grandmama’s creative path that, later, became her profession. 

Iryna as a Canadian artist

As soon as Iryna’s paining required more skills and knowledge, both from practical and theoretical points, Iryna started working on her academic formal art education. So, she got a Master’s degree in Fine Arts. 

Iryna creates her artworks based on her academic background, 30 years of painting experience, as well as her dedication to arts. Her favourite medium is oil and most of her paintings in this medium you can find at her web-site.

As Iryna got her education in Ukraine, with strong academic traditions, her favourite subjects are still lives and landscapes. Apart from many contemporary artists who work from photo, Iryna still choses painting her still lives from life.

Her studio is full of interesting and unique pieces that help her set up compositions for every mood and season, complemented with flowers, plants or fruits. All objects she is depicting have their own little stories that make a novel when painted. 

To practice painting landscapes Iryna goes outdoors. “Landscapes can come across my mind one day and bother my imagination for years, or even decades before I find ideal compositional arrangement for it to transfer onto my canvas”, – that’s what Iryna is saying about her landscapes.

Even though Iryna is a traditional oil artist, she keeps experimenting with  endless possibilities of oil paints. And after she moved to Canada her style changed under influence of the Canadian art culture. 

Now, Iryna is working and teaching art lessons from her home-based studio in Chilliwak, BC. She is an active member of the Burnaby Artist Guild, Federation of Canadian Artists and Chilliwack Visual Artists Association. Few years ago, Iryna was awarded with the AFCA Signature Status in the Federation of Canadian Artists.

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