“I get bored easily,” Marina Veen told me over tea and coffee and a lovely stroll together. A very independent, hard-working woman, Veen played a corporate role since her early 20s. During the Covid pandemic, she found the change she had been searching for.
This career adjustment fed something more important—her soul. “Two hours of meditation wasn’t enough,” Veen said. “It was time to reset.”
During her early years of taking art classes and drawing, Veen was confronted with bias technicalities in creating art—the type of technicalities that hold to rules, the type of technicalities that can hinge creative development, imagination, and heart. She found it void.
“I wished somebody would’ve told me that it was okay to reject technique,” Veen said. “I probably would’ve gone back to art much sooner if I had.” She instead held a conscious mindset toward life as she built it. In her search for something much deeper, it seems that it’s the rejection where she finds the connection to her motivation.
“If I see it is a tree, I am no longer interested,” Veen said. The intense colorism of the works by Henri Matisse in the early part of the 20th century is a good example of where her motivations belong. It is the type of connection that holds the equilibrium between mind and emotion to meet at the surface. It is the intangible reality we all silently attend to. How it is translated, or if it is clear, is something everyone experiences at one point or another. Yet it is here that Veen finds her answers by reflection. The canvas: a mirror.
Darkness to Light
Veen pulls the light from the shadows without manipulation. It is raw and undefined—until it isn’t. The light has been set, revealing the integrity and utter honesty of her focus. It is amid the darkness that one can view, in “Drift by My Windows,” recently displayed at the Parkland Library. Time predisposes beneath, where it is clear by the textures of depth nondiscriminatory. However, beneath all the textures are the stories untold.
Upside Down
Veen is a Ukrainian-American originally from Odesa, who spent much of her prime in the hustle and bustle of New York City. After moving to the California Bay Area with her family and for work, she thought she would never return to the East Coast. The artistic resilience of California held a spark. Yet, things happen. While moving to Seattle for her work with Amazon and Microsoft, and during the time of Covid, she saw the big picture.
“In Between” is an excellent example. If viewed from the opposite direction, one may see an unbloomed flower. Still are the layers on the canvas used to demonstrate perspective. Her impressively high originality cannot go unnoticed. The rejection of a still life is recreated in an entirely new definition of quality, and coincidently, it had been painted upside down. The fluidity of rhythms shines in the sheets of layers, and per the use of perspective, the story unravels, much like the rigid nature of corporate Seattle.
Lavender
The color certainly molds to the surface in characters offset of white. The character is within the color that would commonly be overlooked if not made aware of. Here the body holds much more than its weight. It is in echoes of colors beneath where the lavender-like blend developed unto its finish. During Veen’s weeks of working on this piece, “Echoed Through Me” is just one example of how her work undergoes a total metamorphosis of change—until it speaks fluently.
Methods and Media
Veen is inspired by the songs and poetry of Leonard Cohen, Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, and Rainer Maria Rilke. One can feel the rhythmic fluidity that shows through to the surface of her pieces. It is a movement of poetry held in the textures beneath the surface of her media. Mixed media, acrylic, cold wax and oil, collage, stenciling, gelli plate printing, woodblock printing, and mark-making are just some of the resources used to create her compositions. Her method—addition and retraction.
Veen’s first group show was in September 2023 at the Macy Gallery at Columbia University in New York City. Last summer, she and her family settled in South Florida. There is high anticipation for more of her work still to come.
Today, Veen continues expanding her artistic communication of lost expression through her talent. Her work can be viewed at marinaveenstudio.com and on Instagram at marinaveenfineart.