Collection: Oksana Berda
Oksana Berda is a Toronto-based painter working with mixed media. She holds a Master of Arts from the University of New Brunswick in Creative Writing, which informs the narrative quality of her work as she explores our emotional relationship with landscapes. Berda is an avid hiker and gets her inspiration from trips to various parks surrounding Toronto and spending time on Lake Ontario.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Oksana Berda crosses paths with those also pursuing something intangible. Her paintings study interactions between stone, sand, water and wood. Gathering details from each landscape, she reassembles them as ghostly washes of blue, red and purple paint, braids of graphing pencil, and soft pastel lines which contain the forms that might otherwise stretch out and over the edge. Berda treats colour as character; in her work forms interact and converse: they are introduced, they marry and separate. The landscapes are actively constructed and de-constructed within the process and by the viewer. The mediums move with precision, yet are free and spontaneous; painting on the thresh- old of abstraction, Berda’s compositions embody the spirit of jazz music.