Biography
Halyna Vakulenko is a visual artist and photographer working primarily in oil on canvas, whose practice explores landscape as emotional memory and perception as a form of inner transformation. Her artistic process is deeply connected to photography, as the majority of her paintings originate from her own travel photographs, captured during moments of presence in nature and later transformed into painterly, emotional compositions.
Her artistic language is rooted in post-impressionist expression, enriched by a contemporary poetic approach to nature. Rather than depicting the external world as it appears, she transforms it into a field of emotional resonance, where sea, sky, wind, and light become living carriers of memory and inner states.
Her work often reflects themes of transition, resilience, belonging, and continuity, shaped by personal experience, including migration and the search for inner grounding across different landscapes and cultures.
Selected Collection — Infinity Bay
A series exploring light, infinity, and emotional cycles through vibrant seascapes. Color becomes spatial energy, dissolving boundaries between material and immaterial experience.
Infinity Bay is a contemplative body of work that explores landscape as emotional consciousness—where sea, sky, light, and form become carriers of memory, sensation, and inner transformation. Originating from original travel photographs taken across Cuba, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and other coastal landscapes, each painting begins as a lived moment before dissolving into a more fluid and introspective visual language.
Rather than representing nature as a fixed reality, the series approaches it as a living field of perception. Light does not simply illuminate; it breathes, circulates, and lingers like presence. The horizon becomes a threshold between external world and inner experience, where what is seen gradually merges with what is felt.
Across the series, recurring motifs form a quiet emotional constellation. Trees become guardians of time and continuity, waves transform into symbols of dignity and motion, and light itself becomes a language of memory and renewal.
Ultimately, Infinity Bay is not a place, but a state of perception—an inner coastline where light, emotion, and memory converge into a continuous, breathing horizon.
Selected Collection — New Horizons
New Horizons is a contemplative series centered on nocturnal perception and inner reflection. It explores how silence, moonlight, and night landscapes become spaces of expanded awareness, where memory and imagination intersect.
In Moon Light, inspired by a photograph taken in New Zealand, the night becomes a suspended field of luminous stillness, where landscape and memory dissolve into one another, creating a quiet dialogue between perception and emotional resonance.
Selected Collection — Songs of the Sun
A visual meditation on inner light and human connection, where natural forms become symbols of memory, vitality, and emotional continuity.
Selected Collection — Earth at War
A committed series addressing the war in Ukraine, created during the Art in Cantal festival. Through expressive gesture and chromatic tension, these works reflect rupture, memory, and resilience.
Selected Collection — Peru – Wonder of the World
A reflection on perception and collective memory, where lived experience becomes transformed into emotional landscapes of light and presence.
Jury Statement — Peru – Wonder of the World
“Painter and photographer of Ukrainian origin, Dr. Halyna Vakulenko offers a vibrant and profoundly human vision of the world. Her work, infused with post-impressionist accents, evokes expressive power and emotional intensity. Her dynamic brushstrokes and rich colors bring poetic landscapes to life. A scientist by training and an artist by vocation, she creates an authentic dialogue between art and reality.”
Closing Statement
Painting light. Revealing emotion.
My practice continues as an exploration of transformation — where perception becomes memory, and emotion becomes form.
