Vanessa Onuk

Vanessa, the self-taught artist hailing from Frankfurt am Main, is renowned for her abstract renditions of landscapes and forms merging seamlessly into one another. Her works are characterized by their minimalist approach, reducing snapshots to essential graphic elements such as geometric figures, strong contrasts, and simplifications.

Vanessa's artistic process revolves around the intricate layering of colors using a predominantly transparent acrylic technique on canvas, typically pure organic linen or cotton. Her keen attention to detail is evident in her quest to blur silhouettes and forms, aiming to capture the subjective experience of a landscape.

Her works consist of abstract, expressive landscapes in which she tries to capture the emotions of the viewer through to figurative representations of the female body.

Her style is a mix of soft lines and color gradients, always with a twist of contrast and shapes that surprise and interrupt the artistic representation.

To create effects ranging from intense color bleed to sharp lines and contrasts, she always chooses organic canvas materials such as linen or cotton, which create a unique washed-out, lived-in vintage effect and also allow her to adapt to her clients' size requirements and the desired result.

Vanessa initiates her creative journey with a rough mental blueprint, but she is not afraid to embrace chance and spontaneity. She often allows the natural imperfections of the linen canvas to guide her, leading to breathtaking and unexpected outcomes in her artwork.

“My abstract landscapes are intended to capture a moment in which we want to linger because the sight, the light, the color or the silhouette of an environment captivates us and we want to absorb it.”

Never completely abandoning her scientific background, she uses the unique properties of the materials linen and cotton to achieve the desired effects:

Linen as a base material enriches the images through the unpredictability of the color, creating free-flowing colors and lines that are absorbed into the fabric and which can be influenced from the outside but cannot be dictated.

Organic cotton offers the opportunity to work with attention to detail and precision - the gradients and contrasts are predictable, clear lines can be defined and result in an orderly overall picture with deeply saturated colors.

Both styles combine the emotional view of our earth and the nature that surrounds us, as well as the love and fascination for the human body.  One distinctive hallmark of Vanessa's work is the vintage allure achieved by layering colors on an organic background. This imparts a timeless quality to her paintings, setting them apart from those created on primed canvases.

“My style is constantly evolving, committing myself to a medium or color concept is not my nature. I want to be free as an artist to bring onto the canvas what touches me and evokes emotions. My pictures are about the interaction of technical skill and chance and mistakes during the painting process, which makes each picture unique and unreproducible.”