Marina Chisty, a Russian-American artist now living in New York, finds her inspiration in the complexity of city life and its many layers. Her artistic journey began back in Russia, where as a child, she attended art school and discovered her love for visual expression. Over the years, her skills have been shaped by her cultural roots and a natural inclination toward abstraction and the symbolic use of color, allowing her to blend emotion with abstract forms.
Since 2018, Marina has been refining her artistic approach at the Art Students League of New York. There, she worked closely with mentors while developing her own voice. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a move that speaks to her commitment to artistic growth. Her creative process is intuitive and often unconventional, preferring to paint on the floor where spontaneity guides her. This approach allows her to tap into her inner world, transforming emotions and thoughts into textured, layered paintings.
Her work consistently explores themes of time and transformation, using materials like dust and pigment to symbolize these concepts. One of her standout pieces, Grey Matter, captures the delicate balance between movement and stillness. In this work, pigment becomes a metaphor for the passage of time, with each particle representing a fleeting moment. The viewer can almost feel the pigments in motion, as though they’re suspended before settling permanently on the canvas, a visual expression of the transient nature of time.
Grey Matter invites contemplation on the viewer’s personal relationship with time. It suggests that time isn’t just linear, but fluid and filled with subtle, nearly invisible shifts. The pigments in the painting seem to hover in transition, frozen in a delicate state before resting, creating a visual meditation on existence itself.
In another piece, Collapse, Marina continues to explore themes of fragility and transformation, but this time through fragmentation. Here, pigment is treated as a dynamic, evolving force, shifting across the canvas. The painting feels like a collaboration between artist and medium, with each layer bringing about new forms, controlled only partly by Marina’s hand. The result is a work that seems to evolve even after completion, full of life and energy.
Her connection to natural processes is evident in works like Erosion, where Marina uses natural pigments to evoke the slow, powerful forces that shape the Earth. The painting reflects the journey of stone formation, shaped over millennia by pressure, time, and environmental factors. Similarly, her artwork is built through the gradual layering and breakdown of materials. The earth-derived pigments reinforce the theme of nature’s resilience and the constant cycle of transformation. Erosion serves as a reminder of the continuous changes that occur both in nature and in life itself.
Time, as both a creator and a destroyer, is a recurring idea in Marina’s work. By working with organic materials like dust and natural pigments, she highlights the impermanence of everything around us. Her paintings aren’t static objects but instead appear to shift, change, and transform, mirroring the natural processes she draws inspiration from. This delicate balance of growth, decay, and rebirth runs through her art, creating a tangible link between the natural world and human experience.
For Marina, the process of creating is just as important as the finished product. Her intuitive, hands-on methods allow her to access deeper layers of meaning, resulting in pieces that feel alive and constantly evolving. Her work goes beyond being just a visual experience; it becomes a philosophical and emotional reflection. Through her paintings, Marina offers viewers the opportunity to explore their own perceptions of time, change, and existence.
Ultimately, her art resonates on multiple levels, capturing not just what we see but also what we feel. Marina Chisty’s body of work reminds us that life is a continuous process of transformation, where every fleeting moment carries both significance and beauty.
