Stories and Scenes: Art and Ancestry

Interview with Tatyana Grechina

1. Please tell us something about your background and your art journey so far.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, I came to the USA at a year and nine months old in 1992. I grew up with the USA outside my walls and the inside suspended somewhere in-between, deep in the USSR and its echoes. Existing in this in-between made art a natural space to feel grounded. I’ve painted and drawn my whole life, sewn clothes and created stories. At Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA, I began weaving these practices together, creating wearable fiber works to photograph and paint. After moving to Colorado, I continued staging scenes — often theatrical and usually breaking the fourth wall. I collaborated with photographers to capture the shots and later painted them. The pinnacle of this work is a tarot deck I created with my creative partner from 2022 to 2025, casting, styling, and photographing fellow artists and inspiring individuals across three states, then making collages and digitally manipulating the images. (Shout out @camp.sublime!)

2. Can you tell us more about the theme in your art and your inspiration?

My art is about connection — to ourselves, each other and the greater timeline that binds us. I believe art has the power to change people on an individual level; if anything, to inspire them, awaken some dormant flame. My figures and portraits could be anyone, yet they capture snapshots of the people and experiences in my life. In cataloging these, I add my own layer to the ongoing history of documenting communities through art, honoring the lineage of portraiture and storytelling that I inherit. Documenting my world and those in it casts me as both witness and archivist, capturing history in motion: our times, our clothes, our faces, our stories.

Everyday Opulanc

3. How does your art life impact other parts of your life?

Collaborative at its core, my art thrives on relationships and muses as I study and mirror life. I’m always seeing people as potential conspirators in the creative process, as sources of inspiration and creative beings. At times, my art life has bled into my whole life in unbalanced ways, where I lost touch of reality and my own center. Sometimes, it feels like I have a permanent art lens on, seeing everything as theater, sets, scenes, characters. I’m beginning to understand how to shift the story for myself, not just bear witness artistically. Beyond the guts of my perspective, art now shapes my entire life as I carve a path in it full-time. Along with its spiritual dimension, I’m deeply engaged in the business of art – marketing, media and exhibitions – while learning to balance this world with the demands of a nine-month old baby. Art is my window to the world and the force that gets me out of bed. It comes over me like a wave that creates deep, resonant connections with people, linked by a shared purpose. Again and again, it guides me through transitions and shows me deeper layers of life. It’s the one thing I have kept choosing my entire life. From moving cities to getting divorced, then getting remarried and having a child, each transition either preceded or followed an uncapping of artistic energy and a floodgate of work. Each time, it affirmed that I was on the right path.

Shower Cap Renaissance

4. Is the artist life lonely?

I think the artist life is what you make of it. Sure, it can feel lonely if you stay locked away in your studio working on a painting collection, or have no art friends. But it can also feel quite full, joyful and social if you get out, forge connections and take advantage of all of the community-centric spaces that exist for artists. Go to gallery openings, see other work, attend life drawing sessions. Talk to your artist friends. But I think that at the root, many artists enjoy being alone with their art – immersed in the magic of whatever force they’re tapping into. It can even feel more like work to do all of the social, business-oriented elements of an art career, but these become just as important if we want to truly connect our art to an audience. Maybe the artist life is accidentally lonely because spending time alone is so delicious, we forget to reintegrate back into society. It becomes the biggest balance we must keep: the need to recede inward and discover, create and dream and then re-emerge.

5. What are you working on at the moment and are there any upcoming events you would like to talk about?

Lately, my work has had a shift. Since the birth of my son in May of 2025, I’ve begun to see myself as part of a lineage in more than just art. Rather than underscoring the drama in our modern world with theatrical elements, I find myself drawn to real, ancestral stories – the other side of the USSR’s hidden, complicated history. It feels like studying these threads will somehow guide me forward. The act of reading, listening and channeling have become just as important in my art practice as the drawing and painting. Art becomes a way to digest and transmute. I’m currently working on a multi-part collection revolving around a family member. In an immersive exploration of his life, I’m hoping to illuminate a larger narrative of the society that created him and so many others whose stories will forever go unheard. Two components of this collection include a study of sacred objects – how ordinary items acquire a spiritual resonance once their owner dies, and what happens when we replicate them – and a series of small acrylic studies based on photographs, from infancy to adulthood, just before death.

Website: https://tatyfairy.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tatyfairy/?hl=de