Victoria Radionova's first and main teacher was her father, who was an architect-designer.
From the cradle she was surrounded by reproductions of paintings by great masters from the past. Among the first words that she pronounced were: Gioconda (Leonardo da Vinci), The Blind Girl (John Everett Millais), and Pieta (Michelangelo Buonarroti). Over the years, Victoria learned more about artists and people from different countries and through this, entered the wonderful world of painting, colour and images. By visually studying masterpieces, Victoria sought to display God's world, and longed to master the magic of pencil and brushes in realism.
When she was 14, Victoria began serious preparations to enter art school and focused on the method of study that existed at Tsar's Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg during the 19th century. In this system, the focus was on perfection in drawing, composition and colour. After graduating from secondary school, she entered the Kharkiv State Academy of Arts and Design and studied interior design for a year. Then, Victoria was successfully trained at the College of Art in Simferopol (Crimea, Ukraine). After college, she entered the painting department at Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts where she studied for another year. For the next 17 years under the guidance of her father, Victoria was taught to draw and paint from a program modeled after one that existed at Tsar's Academy of Fine Arts of St. Petersburg.
She practiced and studied the paintings of Russian artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Repin, Viktor Vasnetsov, Abram Arkhipov, Kasatkin, Vasily Polenov, Fechin, and many others). Also, she carefully studied the paintings of Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla, and the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage. Victoria's work is greatly influenced by these masters.
Her paintings are in collections in the United States, Spain, Germany, Ukraine and Russia. Also, her paintings are on view in the Ukrainian Orthodox churches in different cities in Ukraine.
* This statement has been provided directly by the artist in association to their 15th International ARC Salon entries. This content has not been edited for typos or grammatical errors and has not been vetted for accuracy.
