Nastia Craig

"I always gravitated towards bold colors and dramatic compositions as powerful tools to express feelings and create new visual experiences. What excites me about collage is the element of non-premeditative discovery when an array of loose pieces ends as a compelling image. This is a process of turning chaos into order, dissonance into harmony and you never know what it will be until it is finished."

What Craig loves about her work is that it offers opportunities for experimentation and further progression. She uses an explosion of colors and textures to create abstract compositions, and often adds other elements, like a found object or application of 3-dimensional texture. This process engages her critical thinking, but more importantly, allows her to trust her intuition and artistic senses.

This process involves incorporation of painting, drawing, and sketching techniques with such mediums as acrylic paints and markers, pens and inks, and other media on Duralar or other acetate films. These elements are used as a base for collage work that is adhered to a rigid substrate such as Masonite, MDF, or aluminum composite and then finished with resin or varnish.

Craig was schooled in art history, drawing, painting, and composition in the form of private lessons from a young age in her hometown of Odessa, Ukraine. She came to the US at the age of 17 to study interior design and received her BFA from the New York Institute of Technology. Today, Craig combines her independent interior design practice with ongoing study and practicing of art in Madison, WI.