Olesya
Volk

The Painting Process

The Painting Process Olesya Volk's process starts long before the brush touches the panel — it starts in the woods. She walks looking for bark that has already begun to say something: a knot that reads like an eye, a split that reads like a sentence. Photographs and sketches come first, gathered the way a linguist gathers fragments of an unrecorded language, before anything is committed to wood. In the studio, she works in oil and tempera on wood panel, a combination chosen for its patience — tempera's fine, controlled underlayers let her build the fissured, almost carved texture of bark before oil arrives to deepen it into atmosphere and shadow. She paints in layers the way the tree itself grew in rings, each pass responding to what the one before it revealed rather than following a plan fixed in advance. It's less illustration than transcription: she isn't inventing the figures that emerge from the bark so much as waiting for her mind to project them, then deciding, brush in hand, whether to bring them fully into form or let them stay half-hidden, the way they were found. The result is a canvas that keeps something of the forest's own logic — non-linear, layered, faintly alive with shapes that shift depending on how long you look. Volk has described the sensation as a "mirror dialog": the tree reads her as much as she reads it, and the painting is what's left of that exchange.