One Day I Will - People - Animals

This original painting was my entry to the Archibald Prize 2024 at the AGNSW.
Contemplating applying for the Archibald and Sulman exhibitions, I’ve often found myself inventing valid reasons to avoid doing it. Yet, the beauty of annual events is they allow to renew New Year’s resolutions repeatedly.
This year, however, I felt I had to challenge myself and finally submit these applications. ‘If not now, when?’ This phrase has gradually become my guiding principle.
My latest painting ‘One Day I Will’ delves into the realm of choices we all face: to act or do nothing, to exist or to live fully. It questions whether you should remain a passive observer of life’s parade or take action and follow through with it. It echoes Renee Baron’s wisdom from ‘What Type Am I?’: ‘Beware of being so busy observing and figuring out life that you may forget to participate in life itself.’
‘One Day I Will’ is depicted as a conversation between a cat and a cockatoo, symbolizing the internal debate between my introverted and extroverted selves. They’re like two trusted advisors, each with my best interests at heart, yet offering opposing counsel. One is the voice of encouragement, the other of caution. Ultimately, the decision comes down to me, the artist, as the final choice is always our own.
Acrylic paints, edges painted pink, varnished. Signed on the front with a full signature: Olga Kolesnik.

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I am not an artist of one painting style. I like to experiment and explore the art landscape. This is probably definitely complicating my reputation as an artist in gallerists’ eyes, but attracts many different people who look for creative diversity, flexibility and fluidity within one artist. I do not want to die wondering how my art would look like if I were an abstract expressionist. I want to try it, do it, celebrate life as I see it and express myself in more ways than just one.

While always staying true to my favourite subjects such as floral still life, birds, female portraits and occasional landscapes, I utilize elements of a few styles to add interest and a contemporary twist to a painting to create something original and exciting.

In my figurative artworks, I often fill nearly realistic shapes with emotions of certain chosen colours. I also like the intuitiveness and freedom abstract art offers and adore both the pure forms , ‘a form filtered to its essentials’ (Matisse), and conciseness of minimalism and maximalism of colourful expressionist abstracts.

I began to draw and paint when I was a child and finished high school with a formal qualification and certificate allowing me to work as a Graphic Design artist. But it didn’t happen. I got my Master’s Degree in Engineering instead and then worked as an engineer & research scientist and in technical Sales & Marketing.

I have always been interested in art. When I picked up brushes for real, sometime after moving to Sydney, I felt like I never ceased to paint. It took me a few years, many workshops and classes with the best Australian artists to realize that it was time to go on my own journey.

I would call myself an Australian Colourist, an artist who prefers bold, vivid colours. I don’t see the world through dark tinted sunglasses. I would rather exaggerate a colour than imitate greyed muted colour and use the colour that works than the colour that’s ‘really there’. But the truth is I like all the colours to paint with, including the polar opposites, those on a bright Matisse’s palette and neutral pastel hues. I can use only neutral tones if they describe the theme and emotions of the painting better. I believe that our relationship with colours works both ways. They influence our feelings and, the other way around, our mood or personality dictates what colours we dislike, love or choose.

As “an explorer” I will continue to mix and shake popular painting styles in my never-ending and almost impossible quest to discover a new unknown style I can put my fingerprints on.