“You don’t need decades of training or some mythical ‘gift’ to become an artist. You need courage, curiosity, and a willingness to start.”
The Artist in Plain Sight
Creativity coursed through Alena Rezanova’s life from the beginning, shaped by a childhood surrounded by music and artistic impulses. Drawing was a constant companion, yet the idea of pursuing art professionally felt far-fetched in an environment where practical careers were favored. Instead, she entered the commercial world through advertising and later transitioned to product photography, a field she has now worked in for over 15 years. However, even behind the camera, she never let go of her artistic lens. For Alena, lighting and digital retouching weren’t just technical skills—they were modes of self-expression. She often described her work as “painting with light,” wielding Photoshop like a brush, crafting images with intention and care.
The turning point came three years ago, when she resolved to move beyond digital constructs and return to her roots in physical creation. She embraced painting in large-scale oil formats, opening a new chapter defined by introspection, experimentation, and emotional depth. That decision marked a definitive shift—from refining others’ products to crafting her own visual language. Along the way, she deepened her understanding of the psyche by studying psychology, coaching, neuroscience, and art therapy. These disciplines now inform not only her perspective but also the emotional undertones of her work, allowing her to access inner terrain and render it visually with poignant clarity.
Despite following a seemingly circuitous route, every stage of Alena’s professional path has been steeped in creativity. Whether working in visual marketing or exploring subconscious patterns through neuroscience, she always found ways to integrate artistry. Her formal pivot to painting wasn’t a sudden leap but a natural evolution, aligning past experiences with a future that speaks directly from—and to—the inner self. This layered history gives her work an uncommon richness, where years of visual discipline, tactile memory, and emotional intelligence converge on canvas.
Alena Rezanova: Painting the Inner Pulse
For Alena Rezanova, becoming an artist was never a choice—it was an identity waiting for the right moment to emerge. Throughout her life, she created privately, allowing her passion to develop quietly beneath more conventional career layers. But when she chose to commit to her artistic voice fully, she approached the transition with clarity and purpose. She immersed herself in the study of art history, constructed her artist statement with intention, and formed a precise vision for her creative output. This process helped her answer not only what she wanted to paint, but also why she painted and for whom.
Initially, she explored aesthetically driven compositions tailored for interiors, emphasizing surface, material, and technique. However, this phase revealed a deeper need—for meaning, for narrative, for resonance. Alena soon pivoted toward conceptual work that invited reflection, prioritizing emotional content over visual decoration. She found her voice in abstraction, using it not to obscure, but to articulate complex inner experiences. Her paintings became mirrors of thought and feeling, each work an attempt to touch the ineffable. This shift wasn’t merely stylistic; it represented a profound redefinition of what it meant for her to make art.
Over time, Alena realized that her journey could serve a broader purpose. She began to share her story not just through painting but also through personal example. Her creative path underscores that artistry doesn’t demand decades of institutional training or innate genius—it requires openness, resolve, and curiosity. By embracing this philosophy, she now encourages others to challenge their doubts and explore their creative urges. In her words and her work, she reaffirms that the act of beginning—the choice to explore, to risk, to create—is what ultimately defines the artist.
Between Touch and Thought
Alena Rezanova’s practice centers on abstraction, but it’s grounded in the deeply personal and psychological. Her visual narratives explore the subtle interplay between conscious awareness and subconscious emotion. Drawing on psychoanalytic frameworks, she seeks to depict the intricacies of inner life—how the self perceives, feels, and transforms. At the core of her philosophy lies a powerful mantra: “The center is where I am.” This idea becomes a guiding force in her compositions, anchoring her work in the notion that each individual is the nucleus of their lived experience, shaping reality from within.
Her technique is unmistakably tactile. Alena often paints with her fingers, bypassing the brush to engage directly with the canvas. This hands-on approach brings a sculptural sensibility to her work, allowing her to manipulate pigment with an intuitive responsiveness akin to shaping clay. Oil paint became her medium of choice after extensive exploration—from bas-relief textures to alcohol ink—because of its richness, flexibility, and emotional resonance. She values oil for its forgiving nature and the way it invites slow, deliberate transitions in color and depth. Complementing oil, she also employs epoxy resin, drawn to its flowing, unpredictable behavior. The contrast between the controlled and the uncontrollable mirrors the psychological dualities she explores in content.
Technology plays a crucial role in her practice, not as a replacement for the artist’s hand, but as a conceptual partner. She incorporates AI in her creative process, viewing it as a manifestation of a collective archive—akin to Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. For her, AI becomes a bridge between personal insight and communal memory, transforming abstract concepts into tangible form. This blend of analog materials and digital tools creates a layered visual language that reflects our contemporary hybridity—where identities, emotions, and experiences unfold simultaneously across physical and digital planes.
Alena Rezanova: Dreaming in Color, Breathing in Paint
Among Alena Rezanova’s most significant achievements is her DreamScapes series—a body of work that redefined her relationship with art on every level. Created during a time marked by emotional disconnection and depressive numbness, the series emerged as both therapy and revelation. In working on the initial references for DreamScapes, she reencountered the feeling of satisfaction, a fleeting emotion she hadn’t accessed in months. This return of sensation signaled more than recovery—it marked a shift in how she viewed the purpose of painting. No longer was she creating for visual pleasure alone; she was capturing transient emotional states in a way that was raw, specific, and transformative.
Each work within DreamScapes operates as a visual anchor—a snapshot of a rare emotional presence. Alena describes the process as an attempt to hold onto something inherently ephemeral: the brief, flickering contentment that so often vanishes as quickly as it arrives. In these pieces, she merges bold abstraction with visceral tactility, allowing viewers to not just see, but feel the concept of satisfaction on the canvas. Through color, form, and texture, she distills emotion into visual fragments, each one offering an invitation to reflect on what it means to experience, to lose, and to reclaim meaning.
This series has also ignited a bold new vision. Alena envisions DreamScapes evolving into a multi-sensory, immersive installation. She imagines a space where paintings breathe, move, and speak—animated by AI, surrounded by soundscapes, enveloped in scent and texture. Inspired by experiences like the AYA Universe in Dubai, she plans to craft an environment where viewers don’t just observe the art—they inhabit it. Her dream is for visitors to step into the emotional frequency of the work, becoming participants in an expansive act of feeling and transformation. It’s a vision grounded in personal healing but projected outward, inviting others into the center of their own universe.
