On the Work of Yana Movchan:
Writers, Curators and Collectors Speak

Canada’s Yana Movchan Becomes an American “Cover Girl”

Yana Movchan, the Canadian-based painter known worldwide for her expertly realized depictions of still-lifes, reinterpreted religious scenes, and beautifully rendered portraits, is being further recognized by American Art Collector in its March issue. One of her recently completed, but already celebrated works, “Sunset of Life,” has been chosen as the magazine’s cover image. Gary McCallum, owner of Toronto’s McCallum Gallery, which represents Movchan, says, “Now, countless other people can see the glorious work for which Movchan is renowned. Yana often says that she wants people to be able to look at one of her paintings and feel what she felt while painting it. ‘Sunset of Life’ exactly accomplishes that.” The March issue ofAmerican Art Collector is available on newsstands or on americanartcollector.com. 

Just when you thought nobody would ever again paint like Velazquez or Zurbaran or the 17th-century Dutch still-life painters, along comes this young woman named Yana Movchan, with her traditional art training in Kiev and, well, here you have these hallucinatingly detailed paintings of piles of fruit and vegetables with attendant dragonflies, salamanders, frogs, birds, unearthly cats fulminating with consciousness, chunks of moldering cheese, bread crumbs, and goblets and compotes so glassy and sheer you feel they'll shatter if you raise your voice. But, as curator Sophie Hackett points out… Movchan's creatures and foodstuffs and objects do make a place for themselves in our insistently surreal world: "Who decided a wine carafe would be a perfect goldfish bowl?" writes Hackett, or that a lemon's rind would come in a green "too acidic for the 17th century?" Movchan clearly did, in her eccentric and breathtakingly obsessive pursuit of what she calls "holistic permanence: a complete engagement with what outlasts our human foibles."

—The Globe and Mail, May 10, 2003

We bought our first Movchan in 2002, and our second in 2004. We now have five Movchan paintings and we hope for more still!  Our goal is to decorate our whole house with her work one day. 

—Tamara Pringsheim

A moth's wings seem poised to flutter away from the canvas. Dew on a plum seems to vibrate with tension, about to fall out of view. A newt in mid-stride gazes toward the viewer, watching the watcher. Lemons lay freshly peeled – I sniff the air for the scent of citrus. I feel I have lifted a curtain to look into a secret room, somehow, somewhere ensconced behind the drywall of the dining room. There it hangs, a perpetual peep show, and from its pleasures my eyes are not easily averted. Yet Yana's oil paintings are no photographs. No one looked upon such a land until she laid it out for us to see.  Each element, be it a leaf, a frog, a wrinkle in a tablecloth or a cat's whisker, each seems to be held in the wind, about to croak, just to have slipped or to be quivering with a purr. A scene presents itself so perfectly arranged in space, so perfectly timed to seal such tiny movements in an instant, that it could not have occurred even once in an unending universe. It demands to be touched – how else to prove that things cannot be so? Yet Yana made it so, and from the still life in her mind's eye, we are privileged to see what she saw, so skillfully does she lay down her strokes. Looking at such paintings is to dream a lucid dream, to blend real with unreal. You will be tempted to wander away for a while in the world within the frame; I doubt you can resist.

—Jeptha Davenport

Yana Movchan’s paintings are unabashedly beautiful. In elaborately detailed arrangements of fruit, flowers and household pets, she deploys a lush, alluring realism – the shape of pears, the smooth coat of a Persian cat, dewdrops on perfectly pink rose petals – that recalls the visual language of 17th-century Dutch still life paintings. This is beauty for beauty's sake, a feast for the eyes that is anachronistic, obsolete almost, antithetical to contemporary concerns. But just at the moment when we believe she is nothing more than an extraordinary mimic, she shows us otherwise.

Movchan has us wonder how a guinea pig came to sit amid dewy rose petals, and who decided a wine carafe would be a perfect goldfish bowl. The texture of the lemon rind seems somehow too lumpy, exaggerated, the hue of green too acidic for the 17th century. Hers is a world where fairies alight on cheese-laden tabletops, frogs perch nonchalantly on lemons and cats wear jewels and wise, old looks: not quite real, somewhere between fantasy and kitsch.

The history of the still life genre spans the brilliant precision of 17th-century Dutch painting, Chardin’s intimate, hazily-rendered everyday scenes, the abstract collage of the Cubists and the minimalism of Giorgio Morandi. These works typically depict scenes of abundance and bounty, displays of material wealth or the unassuming objects of daily living. Beauty in these paintings serves to tell us about the tulip wars, the dangers of earthly temptations or a new way of seeing.

Movchan calls what she is trying to convey holistic permanence: a complete engagement with what outlasts our human foibles. In a still life, there is an implicit negation of the individual, of ego, event, and narrative. So too in Movchan’s paintings; they belong only to the creatures. She collapses centuries, the domestic and the wild, interior and exterior space to let them co-exist in ways she deems more fit, in scenes that seem to occur behind our backs. This is the beauty of the imagination. Long live the still life.

—Essay by Sophie Hackett