Tanya Zaryski
Tanya Zaryski
painter, glassblower, & mixed-media sculptor
BIO
Tanya Zaryski is a Painter, sculptor, ceramic artist and glassblower based in Clarksburg, Ontario.
Their practice focuses on personal narratives and mythologies, with an attention to detail and inherent symbolism. They work primarily in acrylic on board as a painter, while exploring clay, glass and incorporating found objects into sculptural assemblages.
Their work explores themes of human connection, personal narratives, and our connection to the natural world.
They have a BA from U of T in Art and Art History, and a diploma from Sheridan College in the Craft and Design Program.
Their work has been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally at commercial and public galleries, and is held in many private collections.
Currently, they are focused on creating a relatively new body of work continuing the themes of personal narratives and individual symbolism
They are interested in telling stories of individuals and seeing how they relate to shared experiences of the world, and continue to develop their practice through an extensive daily studio practise.
Select Works
Artist Statement
This collection of paintings are the works that I always imagined I would pull out of myself, in my life as a maker of things. Despite having a decades long career as primarily a landscape painter, my heart has always longed to use painting as a vehicle to tell my own stories and create mythological visions from my own experiences. I remember reading Margaret Atwood’s “Cat’s Eye” in my last year of high school. The book is about the life of a painter. Her childhood was not mine, though there were things about it that rang familiar and true. Her time in art school, also not mine, though also not unimaginable. But her work was exactly the sort of work that I wanted to make. Drawing from personal narratives and larger archetypes. Imagery that calls to our half remembered dreams and distorted flashes of childhood memory. It’s always hard to know where the inspiration for paintings comes from. Where ideas are generated and what will trigger some break through flash. It maybe begins with reading a novel that hit home as a not-quite-yet-adult. Since then I have gotten into and out of relationships, bought a farm, became a mother, sold the farm. Each event shaped the person I continue to become. An opportunity for reinvention came during the long weeks and months of Covid lockdowns. Missing my tiny handful of people intensely, I decided, in the long tradition of artists painting their friends, to undertake a series of portraits. Each piece becomes like a love letter, a gift, an act of seeing another person deeply. This gesture of painting a portrait requires a deep level of attention directed towards another. We don’t generally spend hundreds of hours staring intently at another, even between friends. It becomes uncomfortable if not unbearable. By working with photos (as we practiced social distancing) and creating half-imagined intimate landscapes for my subjects I found myself able to dwell on them and hold them gently in all their beautiful, awkward human-ness and carry on imagined conversations with them as I paint late into the nights.