My name is Indre, at this moment I’m 42 years old and I can present myself as actively creating Lithuanian artist from the city of Kaunas. If speaking about my education in the field of art, I have studied at Kaunas A. Martinaitis Art School at my early years, at painters A. Šatas studio and R. Levulienė painting studio, in Kaunas University of Technology I had acquired architect’s profession. But actually my career is kind of twofold - I work as a university teacher and researcher in the field of architecture and landscape and as actively creating visual artist.
My artist career has started quite late in my life, I am actively involved in art field since 2017 - approximately for 6 years. Currently I work with various techniques: oil and acrylic paints, watercolors, ink, pastels, mixed media, digital art, creative Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. I paint, draw illustrations, visual notes and mind maps, create generative digital artworks that can be defined as human-AI collaborations. Since 2018 I have organized several personal exhibitions, and participated in collective physical and online exhibitions. In total I have participated in more than 30 art events. I also display my art in two social media accounts (Facebook page: Indrės paukščiai / Indre’s Birds; Instagram: indregv).
The themes of my artworks range from everyday environment, especially nature and animals to alchemy and mysticism and up-to-date technologies. My artistic interest in nature corresponds well with my scientific interest in environmental ethics and environmental movements. I could be defined as animal artist or nature artist as almost all my works include animal, bird or other living creature or ecosystem feature either as straightforward representation but more often as a symbol. I can mention several sources of inspiration. First of all spending time in nature walking and observing colors, shapes, and patterns, learning about nature from various sources. I also take nature photographs both for inspiration and for working with generative AI algorithms. Another important source is the invisible realm - dreams, visions, imagination. Mythology, mysticism resources and environmental ethics ideas also greatly contribute to this intangible source of inspiration. My recent interest is generative AI algorithms and the rapid development and creativity of this artificial mind inspires me greatly as well. I usually create intuitively and, even if I have kind of formal education in the art field (art school and architecture studies, which included a lot of academic drawing at that time), I do not follow any rules consciously and create with a flow. I usually start from what I would call visualization in my mind. The images usually emerge in my imagination as a synthesis of various impressions, emotions, ideas that I get and experience during the day. In order to record the ideas I do lots of sketches and I actually have a load of sketchbooks with my drawings. After sketching I transfer some of the ideas to the larger formats on canvas or paper.
If speaking about the hardships in my art journey, first of all for me it is quite difficult to find a place in the art world and especially in local Lithuanian context, which is quite conservative, as I have started creating intensively quite late and also my education is not in the field of painting. Moreover, I like using and mixing various techniques and also mix my researcher and artist careers, which may also seem strange and unusual. Nevertheless the situation is changing rapidly with opening international possibilities as well as with growing openness and increasingly positive views of society. Thus there are much more things that make my happy about my art journey compared to hardships. There are several aspects that make me really happy; first of all is the feeling of self-realization and some kind of therapeutic effect that I get creating in my painting studio entitled Wooden Fox. Painting for me is special type of meditation. Another nice aspect is that my researcher and teacher career nicely intersects with my artistic career at many points: I apply some artistic practices (sketch-notes, mind-mapping) in my teaching practice and also became interested in artistic research in recent years.
Indre Grazuleviciute-Vileniske
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