Moscow-born artist and illustrator Olga Timireva didn’t so much choose art as quietly refuse to stop doing it. “I’ve been drawing for as long as I remember,” she says. Growing up in an intellectual family where art, piano, and languages were part of a “proper” education, she was encouraged to treat creativity as refinement — not a career. So she became a lawyer, filling her lecture notebooks with portraits, drawing for herself through years of “serious” work.
That private ritual eventually became her language. During the pandemic, she began painting again in earnest — a personal project that grew into exhibitions, collaborations, and a new professional life.
By 2023, Timireva had staged her first solo show — and then another, and another. The momentum stuck.
“My style is on the darker side — light through pain, light through difficulty. I want people to feel that a beam in the dark is where growth begins.”
Illustration that stepped off the page
Her friends at university were the first to notice. “Everyone knew I was sketching during lectures,” she laughs. “My notebooks were portraits.” One classmate later asked her to illustrate a children’s book — a small print run, but a first published work.
Around that time, she connected online with another young artist working on a music video for the Russian musician Dolphin. “He had this beautiful, graphic way of drawing,” she recalls. “He invited me to collaborate — to help visualize a clip that mixed illustration and live action.”
The project was never completed, as life took a difficult turn for her collaborator. “Still,” she says, “it taught me how powerful visual storytelling can be — how it carries emotion, memory, and fragility all at once.”
From paper to space
Years later, Timireva began translating that same emotional storytelling into physical environments. Not as a full interior designer — “I don’t build spaces from scratch” — but as someone who infuses rooms with narrative and atmosphere. Sometimes that means choosing or painting artwork; sometimes it’s reimagining a wall, a corner, a light source.
One Belgrade café became a highlight: she covered its white walls with bold black linework so the entire place looked like a sketch come to life.
“You walk in and your brain flips,” she says. “It feels hand-drawn — like you’ve stepped into a cartoon.”
On one wall, three “windows” open onto detailed views of Copenhagen — drawn more finely, almost like engravings. The contrast creates a subtle visual trick: you’re standing in a drawn world, looking out onto a world that seems more real, though it’s also made of ink.
The result evokes the dreamlike visuals of What Dreams May Come — the 1998 Robin Williams film where painted landscapes become entire emotional worlds. “It’s that same feeling,” Timireva says. “You step into a place that was once only in someone’s imagination — and suddenly, you’re inside it.”
Aesthetic of light and meaning
Her work leans toward the classical — clear forms, tangible technique — but conceptually it plays with chiaroscuro and ambiguity. Darkness is not the enemy; it’s contrast. “If there’s a little light, carefully placed, it becomes magic,” she explains. “That’s what transforms a room — the delicate balance between shadow and glow.”
Her philosophy of beauty owes more to Aristotle than Instagram. “We perceive beauty when things are ordered toward a purpose,” she says. “A space that functions clearly, without clutter, feels harmonious. Our brains rest. That’s well-being.”
Minimal, ergonomic, and precise — with one accent that hits the target. That’s her version of elegance.
The emotional reaction
“I love watching faces change,” she admits. “Some people soften; others light up. They don’t know what was there before — they just feel something. That’s when I know the atmosphere is doing its work.”
Looking ahead
Timireva sees art, interiors, and well-being as an ancient continuum rather than a new trend. “Humans have always built atmospheres,” she says. “From firelit caves to Gothic cathedrals to cozy cafés — each space holds emotion.”
She imagines that in the future, physical and virtual interiors will merge: augmented reality, VR, digital worlds with tactile echoes. But alongside that, she believes, will survive “warm, nostalgic, analog spaces — rooms that glow like old film stills.”
Current work: Apologia Festival in Belgrade
This November, Timireva brings her vision to the Apologia Immersive Art Festival in Belgrade — a large-scale underground project dedicated to exploring transformation and the mythic journey across the River Styx. Her works there include paintings, her first-ever sculptures, and contributions to the festival’s set design inside a vast vaulted bunker.
“It’s a mix of beauty, history, transformation, and darkness,” she says. “I love that it’s both classical and modern — neon, music, sensuality, art. I dreamed of creating something like this two years ago, an underground space where people can truly immerse — confront their shadow side and find it beautiful.”
Advice for young creatives
“See the whole picture first,” she says. “Start with the concept — the world you want to build — and then move from general to detail. When the structure is alive, everything else falls into place.”
About the artist:
Olga Timireva is an artist and illustrator working at the intersection of fine art, narrative, and spatial design. Her works explore chiaroscuro, emotion, and the transformative role of light — from canvas to interiors to immersive environments. She is currently based in Europe and open to international collaborations.
New York Herald 
Leave a comment