Olesya Volk paints the language hidden in bark and branch — a symbolist reading of nature's oldest, quietest alphabet.
Olesya Volk (a.k.a. Olga Volozova) Olesya Volk is an L.A. based artist/writer. She started writing and publishing her fairy tales and puppet plays in Moscow, Russia where she graduated from the State Institute of Theatre (GITIS) After moving to the US, Olesya Volk graduated with M.F.A. in Film &TV (Animation) from the UCLA,1998 She worked after that doing web animation for some companies (like Paris Blues, LA) part-time and free-lance. She also worked for the LA Cultural Affairs Department program dedicated to teach art and art appreciation to the middle school age children, In the Eagle Rock Cultural Center, in Tierra Del Sol Cultural Center (Sunland), and some other local centers of LA. In 2008, her first book in the US was published by the Sparkplug Publishing (Portland, Origen), “The Airy Tales”, a collection of her tales with her own illustrations and design. After that, two more of her illustrated books/graphic novels had been published by the same company; “Rock That Never Sleeps” ( collaboration with Juliacks) and “The Golem Of Gabirol”.Olesya Volk also practiced painting intensively; she joined the Los Angeles Art Association in 2016 and became a regular participant in their events, shows and critique groups. She has been exhibiting her art in the galleries of Los Angeles and sometimes, abroad. Around 2019, she created a FairyTale Club for artists at the Neutra Museum and Gallery, in Silverlake, LA, and together with the main curator, Dulce Stein, she had been curating and organizing the special shows for the artists , at the Neutra. During the pandemic, the FairyTale Club still was functioning online bringing together many amazing artists in the special online exhibits and even granting the certificates to the participants. After the Neutra museum changed its profile, Olesya had been still organizing the FairyTale Club shows in other galleries of LA (currently at Hive Gallery, DTLA). Olesya Volk has also been self-publishing her picture books/graphic novels, sometimes in collaboration with her son, and participating in many various comic conventions and zine festivals. She has been also taking part in various exhibits with her oil paintings, drawings, paper dioramas, her art always inclined to the fairy tale/mythological realm.
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.
A peek behind the easel
