Nick Tarasov: 2018 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention

Nick Tarasov: 2018 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention by Daniel McCulloughJuly 15, 2018

©Nick Tarasov

Nick Tarasov is a Russian contemporary artist who works both in painting and photography in St. Petersburg. His project, Sketches from Home, is a series of typologies of place, allowing him to return to his native Siberia and see it anew, bringing together images with connections of color, subject, and surrealist seeing.

For more than 12 years he successfully studied the canons of the classical realistic school of painting and drawing at the Novosibirsk College of Arts, then at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. During the study Nick received the grant “Proud of Siberia” in nomination “Hope of Siberia”. Exploring the history of classical and contemporary art Nick discovers for himself the world of photography and begins to actively use this medium in his work.

His photographs and paintings have been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Museum of the Academy of Arts, Blank Wall Gallery, First Watercolor Gallery, 5&J Gallery, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and at events such as Reclaim Photography Festival 2017 and Trieste Photo Days 2017.He has been published in the books Immigration (RoHo Press, 2017) and Open Boundaries (loosenArt), in magazines Ruum, Propeller, Shoot Film UK, F-stop, Lenscratch, Don’t Take Pictures, Prada Journal, among others. His works are in private collections in Russia, USA, China, UK, Serbia.

©Nick Tarasov

Sketches from Home

I returned home after a long absence, but again just for a short period of time. Siberia is a harsh and distinctive region in the center of Russia – this is where I am from. Only when I was away from home, I began to think about the meaning of my origins and my own culture for me. Now many things, familiar from childhood may seem amazing, bizarre, wild, strange or amusing to me, and I want to capture them, I am proud of them. They give me energy. I am looking for connections between them, between these people, their relations with that place and that time, with myself. And this search is full of doubts and surprises. For me a sketch is a first step, an attempt and whenever I try doing one, my doubts get dispelled.