Katerina Belkina’s Photo Manipulations
Katerina Belkina is an international award-winning visual artist and photographer born in 1974 in Samara, Russia. Belkina grew up in an artistic family and always knew she wanted to be an artist. She attended a public art middle school, and went on to study at the only academy of art in her city. Classical technique was stressed throughout her education. After graduating, Belkina worked successfully as a commercial photographer.
Her works essentially focus on female portraiture and beauty. The viewer enters the inner world and sees the world of different state of mind through women’s eyes. In most of her feminine portraits something is conspicuously abstract and dramatic. Katerina Belkina is also a skilful digital artist and photo manipulator who manages to give a surreal touch to her works. She arranges several photographic elements into an image which is then manipulated in Photoshop, and sometimes enriched with traditional painting tools such as charcoal, paints and pencil. So her art is both lifelike and dreamlike. There is something strangely alluring about Belkina’s self-portraits that produces an uneasy response in the viewer.