Ivanka Nechyporuk on Surreal Geese, Colour, and One Form With Many Worlds

The Kyiv-based painter, trained as an art restorer, on how a white goose became her canvas for emotion and identity, and why she trusts intuition over trends.

In short: Ukrainian artist Ivanka Nechyporuk paints geese in colours and patterns that do not exist in nature: leopard spots, tiger stripes, panda markings, necks that coil like snakes. Trained in art restoration, she treats the white bird as a blank canvas for inner states. Here she talks about colour as her strongest tool, the 2022 paintings that started the series, why being copied made her think about her brand, and how social media brings both collectors and galleries to her.

Ivanka Nechyporuk can describe her practice in one sentence.

I am an artist who explores emotions, identity and the inner world of a person through the surreal image of a goose.

Then she offers a shorter version: “One form — countless worlds.”

That is the whole practice in miniature. The form stays recognisable: a goose, painted with a restorer’s patience for feather, eye and beak. What changes is everything laid over it — colour, pattern, and sometimes the anatomy itself.

A restorer’s training, and a fear removed

Born in 1994 in Netishyn, Ukraine, Nechyporuk chose art for herself. After school she was deciding between music, dance and art; music and choreography had been her mother’s choice, art school was her own. “So it turned out to be an intuitive choice.”

She went on to a master’s degree in art restoration at Kamianets-Podilskyi Ivan Ohiienko National University. The training gave her the fundamentals — anatomy, colour theory, form and materials — and a community of artists. It also gave her something less obvious.

It took away the fear of mistakes. I knew I could fix anything if something went wrong with a painting.

She first felt like a professional in her second year at university, when she was trusted with 18th- to 20th-century canvases to restore, and when her first paid commissions arrived. Restoration also showed her where her strength lay. Matching and mixing colours for damaged paintings, she found that colour came easily to her: “That’s when I understood it was my strong side.” She also loved watching an old painting “get a new breath and a new life.”

The knowledge still protects her own work. She knows which paints can be layered — oil can go over acrylic, but not the other way round, because acrylic may not bond to an oil layer — and she has already restored her own paintings when it was needed. “There’s no fear. It saves your nerves.”

In 2018 she moved to Kyiv, where she still lives and works. The change was one of scale: “In Kyiv, my personal boundaries in art expanded to infinity. I understood I could achieve anything I wanted.”

How the goose arrived

Before geese, she painted murals and portraits. At some point she noticed the goose and found it a very painterly bird. She wanted to paint it, put the idea aside, and came back to it about half a year later.

The first goose painting came during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “It was probably my own kind of reflection on events, because from the start they were in blue, violet, yellow and orange.” The idea of the geese was already there before the invasion, she notes; turning them blue and yellow was the response to what was happening. Painting them distracted her and steadied her emotionally, and the audience responded very warmly, which only helped her keep making new work. Still, she did not want to stay in the patriotic series for long, and moved on.

Before that first canvas she spent half a year not looking at image feeds at all, so that she would not absorb someone else’s idea without noticing. “We can see something somewhere, forget it, and after a while make a painting and be sure the idea is ours — when in fact we once saw it somewhere.” So she names no artistic influences: what inspired her was nature and a love of surrealism.

A white bird as a blank canvas

Why did the goose become her central character? It happened by itself, she says. Ideas kept coming, although she had once considered imagination her weak side, and the strong response from people charged her even more.

A goose is white, like a blank canvas, so I convey a state through colour. They also have eyes, and through the gaze I can convey the mood and the depth of the theme I want to express.

Today she calls the goose her visual language. People already associate it with her, which pleases her, and she can be recognised by colours and patterns alone. Asked what the goose means in a few words, she answers: “A symbol through which I convey different states, experiences and transformations.”

Her geese also change over time. Compare the paintings from 2022 with today’s, she says, and they are entirely different, with different moods.

Combining what nature doesn’t

She used to worry that a single recognisable image would limit her. Now she sees it the other way round: staying “afloat” in one subject for so long is hard, and she has managed it. And her style was never only the goose.

I combine what doesn’t combine in nature, and I really like it.

While she believed she was confined to the goose, she was building a visual language out of colour and pattern without realising it. Then she began merging animals: the head of a goose on the body of a seahorse, or goose-snakes. Other animals and birds now appear in her style as well.

The combinations come out of practice. Sketches form during the process; she plays with shapes and colour pairings. “My brain started thinking differently. It leads me further into ideas I could never have imagined I would create.”

What she is exploring now is duality: the many sides of a personality and how different worlds can coexist in one form. Every work reflects a period of her life, she says, but the most personal are those in which she explores her own identity.

Sketch first, then the canvas

A new painting may begin with an emotion, a memory or a pairing of colours. Choosing colour is intuitive for her now, but that intuition rests on colour theory.

Most works are planned in advance. She works out sketches in detail so as not to lose time at the canvas: on a sketch she sees the whole picture at once, while a large canvas makes it hard to see the overall image as she paints. There are exceptions, when a painting is made directly without a sketch. She also likes to combine graphics and painting, with part of a canvas painted and part drawn. What matters most in a painting, for her, is composition and emotional state.

Her studio ritual is simple: arrive, drink a coffee, then start painting. Nothing should distract her — she must not be hungry, cold or hot — so that every thought is on the painting. The brushes must be good, new and clean, and the palette clean too.

The most enjoyable stage is the first layer, when she lays in the whole foundation and composition. The hardest is the final strokes.

You have to put the brush down in time and not go back in, so that the painting does not lose its freshness — but so that everything is painted the way I want.

A work is finished when she looks at it and feels no wish to correct or add anything.

When being copied makes you a brand

Nechyporuk began to think of herself as a brand when people started copying her paintings and stealing her ideas. For her, an artist’s brand is the path itself, with its successes and failures, and recognisability. Asked which elements make her work recognisable — the geese, the colour, the surreal approach, the personal story, the way she communicates — her answer is all of them.

She does not try to balance consistency against experiment. “I simply transfer all my ideas onto the canvas. Better to do it than not to.” It does not matter whether a viewer understands her right away; if an idea resonates with her, she makes it. “For me, I am the most important critic.”

The most common mistake she sees in artists building a personal brand is comparing themselves with other artists, often the most successful ones. “It only makes things worse. So it’s better to compare yourself with yourself in the past and look at your own achievements.”

Context is something she gives deliberately. When she wants to, she writes a description; when she wants a viewer to find something of their own in a work, she may not even give its title.

Social media as the door to galleries

Nechyporuk does all of it herself: she photographs her work, runs her social media, writes the texts and talks to collectors. Several galleries now represent her and take on part of this, but she still sells directly as well. Asked what actually helped her become more visible, she names one thing: active social media.

Online platforms play one of the important roles in her career, she says, because they make it convenient to sell paintings and to present them to a wider audience. The internet gave her “the chance to show myself to the whole world”: it is much easier to come into people’s view and find the people who appreciate your work. For her that mostly means social networks, and that is also how galleries find her. Online posts have led to both sales and exhibitions many times, because galleries write to her with proposals there. The content that draws the strongest response is finished paintings and process.

She is just as clear that one channel is not enough. Practice comes first; regular content matters “so as not to disappear”; exhibitions matter because paintings are perceived completely differently in person; and gallery representation helps prices grow and frees up time for practice, because others handle sales and presentation. She has prints, and sees collaborations as a good chance for people to see her art in another format.

Alongside her social media and galleries, her paintings also have a home under her own name: a professional website at ivanka-nechyporuk.art, built on Digital Original, where each work has its own page with its title and year.

Intuition over trends

On whether artists should adapt to the market, she is direct.

I’m not about adapting. I believe an artist should feel themselves first, because in the race to get into the trends you can lose yourself.

Art that is sincerely felt, she says, will reach everyone’s heart.

The project she wants most is international solo exhibitions, and as she answered these questions her first solo exhibition was taking place in Taiwan. Whether the goose will stay at the centre, she does not plan: everything happens intuitively. Her dream is for her art to find a response in people around the world and help them discover something new in themselves. “I dream of becoming a world-famous artist while I’m still alive!”

To an artist who is just starting out and fears her theme is too strange, she says:

Don’t be afraid, listen to yourself, experiment, and work a lot, a lot. Practice sometimes decides everything by itself.

And what should a viewer feel in front of her paintings? Curiosity, an emotional response and the freedom of their own interpretation. “But most importantly, that my art evokes emotion. No indifference — positive or negative, but emotion!”

Explore Ivanka Nechyporuk’s paintings on her website, ivanka-nechyporuk.art, and follow her on Instagram at @ivanka__nechyporuk. To see how other artists present their work, explore more artist websites in the Digital Original showcase.

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