Olga and Aleksey Ivanov | In Sync

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Olga and Aleksey Ivanov are together. They live together, work together, and create together. They talk almost in one voice, speaking in concert about their art practice—one that exists only because the couple is in sync, thinking and painting in harmony. These classically trained painters have made art a team endeavor, contributing equally to each piece they create in their Colorado studio. Working mostly with tempera paint, they thrive on effectively fusing the traditional with the contemporary, so that their work is, in turn, harmonious.

Olga and Aleksey first met when both were painting students at the Academic College of Art and Design in their native Moscow. As college students often do, the two young painters critiqued each other’s work, many times in spirited discussions. As time passed, their feedback morphed from verbal to tangible, as each one started making marks on the other’s work. This went on for some time, until one day they decided to join forces officially and make art as a “family team.”

Nearly 25 years later, they continue to operate as a collective, channeling their ideas and experiences into art. They share the creative process from inception to completion, each one participating in every stage of a painting.

Inspiration comes from ideas that materialize throughout the day, often while they’re driving through the Colorado landscape. They enjoy these drives and use the time to talk. Once home, one team member might loosely sketch what they discussed while the other tends to groceries or dinner. Then the pencil changes hands and the roles reverse. “After all these years working together, we have come to the point that the most important part is not execution,” says Aleksey. “It’s all about ideas. It’s all about what you’re going to say.”

The entire process is hands-on and includes initial sketches, handmade panels, the marble-gessoed surface, the preliminary drawing, and finally, the painting. Once the painting process begins, the piece travels from Olga’s easel to Aleksey’s and back again while each one works in precision detail to execute their vision. It’s a meticulous yet fluid process, because each artist recognizes and respects the other’s strengths. Aleksey notes that Olga is especially talented at painting luminous, naturalistic faces, while Olga gives Aleksey credit for creating dynamic compositions with a strong quality of line.

“It works for us,” they both say, describing this intriguing arrangement that finds life and art totally integrated. The harmony the Ivanovs have achieved isn’t surprising, however—they have always shared the same passion and drive to excel, both creatively and professionally. They’ve found harmony in their style as well, wherein one hand is indistinguishable from the other, as if the resulting images come from a single source.

The Ivanovs’ body of work boasts a large variety of subject matter. “We love to explore,” Aleksey says, and to that end their repertoire includes landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and even abstract compositions. The couple appreciates the spontaneity of being able to grow with every new idea and experience. “We paint anything beautiful that strikes our mind,” Aleksey continues. “It’s all about being broad, trying this and that. It’s always an adventure.”

Since arriving in the mountains, the Ivanovs have shifted much of their focus to painting the landscape—sometimes in its natural state, and other times as an environment containing figures. The shift began when the pair moved to the United States in 2002, intent on taking their art career to the next level. Toting several suitcases, art supplies, and their young son, they set out on what proved to be the most fortuitous adventure of their lives. It wasn’t long before they decided to head west. The two artists had long held a desire to live near the woods, to see mountains, to take an easel and paint outdoors. Aleksey, in particular, had always felt an inexplicable affinity for the American West. “I was very fascinated with the cowboy lifestyle,” he says.

They traveled to Colorado and instantly found the place they knew they belonged. It was their dream come true. “We came to Colorado, we fell in love,” says Aleksey. Now the Ivanovs have a home in Evergreen, close enough to take advantage of Denver’s urban offerings but far enough from city life that they can look across wide expanses of unspoiled land, into the mountains, and up at the vast western sky. They have converted their garage into a studio, where they not only paint but also construct their own supports, frames, and other materials. “We have an amazing view,” remarks Olga, who delights in watching the bears, deer, foxes, horses, and birds that frequent the area.

Their painting SEPTEMBER SNOW highlights this heady natural beauty. Like many of their landscapes, it celebrates the bounty they encounter every day, exemplified by the countless aspen trees that seem to burst out of the picture plane. It’s a quiet, intimate scene, yet it also suggests a vastness just beyond its borders. It’s “our landscape,” they say.

In many instances, the Ivanovs employ the landscape as the foundation for a larger narrative containing an array of symbols and pictorial details. SIGN [see page 88] exemplifies such a composition. Though based on Renaissance-era pictures featuring a figure in profile backed by a receding landscape, this painting infuses that tradition with modern elements like the hard-edged white square in place of a curtain. Likewise, symbolic elements are scattered throughout the picture plane: a sprouting onion symbolizing spring and fighting stags exhibiting nature’s force. In the background, the mountainous landscape juxtaposes rural with urban, wild with settled, interloper with native. Olga and Aleksey revel in this eclectic aesthetic approach that intermingles eras, meanings, and cultures. It allows them to incorporate their own history into the traditions of the canon. “It’s our own language,” Olga says.

While they were in school together, the Ivanovs developed an intense fascination with old-world academic techniques and, in particular, painting with tempera. They carried that interest forward after graduation, when they worked restoring centuries-old Russian icons. Ultimately, they adopted tempera as the primary medium in their own painting, in part as a nod to the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance masters who inspired them. “In the early days of our career, we experimented with mastering a host of mediums, but it was when we explored Russian iconography and the European Renaissance, learning the beauty, grace, and poetic harmony of egg tempera and gilding, that we knew we had found our highest passion,” they write. “We love the challenge and extreme level of detail demanded by this highly sophisticated medium, the way it commands our full attention and a perfect blending of skill and sensitivity.”

Over the years, Olga and Aleksey have honed their practice to bring an ostensibly outmoded art form into the modern era, fusing time-honored techniques with present-day icons and emblems of life in the American West. In doing so, the Ivanovs strive to take tempera to the “next level,” making it accessible and engaging for contemporary audiences.

Philosophically, tempera offers the artists a sense of tradition and a connection to history. On the technical side, it dries quickly, providing a smooth, porcelain-like surface that can be layered and feathered to create lifelike figures with striking luminosity and dimension. They also value the simplicity of tempera’s physical composition, which consists only of egg yolk mixed with pigment. “All you need is a chicken and pigment,” jokes Aleksey. At the same time, Olga explains that tempera’s quick-drying nature requires the artist to have a vision before embarking on a painting. The Ivanovs clearly map out each composition through a series of loose sketches and composed drawings that transform a burgeoning idea into a finalized narrative—all before brush touches panel. “The entire process has been polished,” says Aleksey. “We will never stop searching, trying to invent something new, even more beautiful. But the process has been polished.”

The Ivanovs sum up their tempera-based practice as additive, a method that comprises layer upon layer of delicate marks applied in thousands of strokes and hatch marks. “In a way, it’s like drawing,” Olga says of the scrupulous process that produces an astonishing naturalism saturated in extraordinary detail. “You can’t do the same in oil.”

The Ivanovs are planning for two major solo shows in 2019, the first at Saks Galleries in Denver and the second at Howell Gallery in Oklahoma City. The Denver show, titled Going West, is especially timely for the pair, as it embodies their passion for the American West and celebrates the culture and landscape that they have embraced and that continues to inspire them. “It’s about the West, and what the West is for us,” says Olga. “It’s nature, the open spaces that surround us, the beauty of aspens, animals, and horses. We’re really in love with it.”

representationSaks Galleries, Denver, CO; Howell Gallery, Oklahoma City, OK; www.oaivanov.gallery.

This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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