November 2021 Vol. 2, No.10

Index

Tanya Kukucka, from the Hudson Valley in New York, does not do that. She does not care what you think, preferring Andy Warhol’s edict “Don’t think about making art – just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad. While they are deciding, make even more art.”

Kukucka’s recent art includes sculptures and portraits, both filled with vast symbolism and mystery. Her hard skills and sophisticated techniques are as notable as her unique conceptualizations. All of her artwork is exceptional in its rich originality and unusual visualizations. Her paintings, in particular, showcase refined elegance and exquisite style, with realistic, stunningly beautiful portraits of androgynous figures in fantasy world settings. Her sculptures combine natural and manmade materials to create otherworldly figures, often with dolls as the basis. She adorns and transforms them with paint, decorations, skulls, bones and other things until they are metamorphosized into illusory fantasy figures. One often repeated feature of her doll sculptures is an open torso cavity containing some other object.

The reaction to her sculptures varies. Some viewers see it for what it is, a creative collage, an artist’s surrealistic play on unusual juxtapositions to create interesting new forms, part alien, part animal, part human. Others see a darker side, projecting their own perceptions on Kukucka’s sculptures, imagining them to be representative of something sinister, like witchcraft or occult. Kukucka categorically rejects the notion that her work is in any way demonic or satanic, “It’s their issue rather than mine. I am just exposing my inner feelings. Actually, I make these so that I can be a nice person. I am facing my own inner darkness. People ask me if I have nightmares. I don’t, because I do my art. As a child I held things in. Now I let it out. I see things from a different perspective.”

The symbolisms in her paintings are her expressions of her own inner anguish, merely personal coping mechanisms. For Tanya Kukucka, art is a cathartic process. It is not a representation of evil, not scary art intended to frighten Christians, but her own reaction to a scary world, based on her own life experiences and trauma. She lost her mom in a car accident at a young age and still laments over childhood experiences that have scarred her. She had to give up much of her teenage years by having to take care of her younger siblings and she had more than her share of the teenage angst and vulnerabilities. She was drawn to the heavy metal music scene and, like many teens, one of her escapes was watching horror movies, both of which has in some way informed her expressions. To this day she fixes lavish and extraordinary Halloween costumes and plays the dressing-up part to the hilt. She loves Alice in Wonderland and is intrigued by the magical. It is all just play. “I am fascinated with death, which has always been a mystery. I try to accept it. I use skulls in my art because to me they are things of beauty that represent the cycle of death and the transition back to life.” She is not ripping a baby open. What some may perceive as grotesque is just her letting things out.

Kukucka does not take drugs or indulge in intoxication. Art is her self-therapy. “When I don’t do my art, I get irritable. When bad things happen and life is tough, you got to let things out somehow.” Her paintings usually juxtapose an androgynous, beautiful figure, often musicians or other people she admires, with many different representations of symbols that mean something specific to her: hearts, snakes, apples, cats, thorns, bats, flowers and more.

“I paint for myself and not for others. If they like it, good. I don’t paint self portraits but when I paint a subject, it’s really not them. It’s me. I substitute that person, that muse, for myself. The symbols I use are for life energy, they are keys to new doorways. I just like to make stuff up and that’s my fantasy-life because real life is boring in comparison. It’s my escape. It’s comforting to me. I like thinking, sketching and doing.”

Her real life does not actually seem all that boring. ‘Prolifically busy’ may be a better description. She has managed to sustain a living by working full-time in assisting several other regional artists in pottery and sculpture studios. That relegates time for her own art to limited status. She is highly sought after by other artists because of her impeccable technical skills and strong work ethic. “I don’t have a good business sense. I don’t like computers. They hinder my creativity. I learned persistence and this allows me to do what I love, to make a living as an artist. This way I am able to paint and work to make money.” This persistence has served her well since graduating from the art program at the State University of New York Purchase, where she studied under the famed woodcut printmaker Antonio Frasconi. She has been working at perfecting her skills since age five, with unending passion and dedication. Her work is shown in top regional galleries and she has been successful in selling her art, despite her self-professed aversion to the art business.

We all have to make it through life the best way we can. Tanya Kukucka is a superb professional who loves what she does and goes her own way. Nothing else matters to her.

Hammond Museum curator Bibiana Huang Matheis, who frequently exhibit’s Kukucka’s work, calls her an “artists’ artist” who everyone respects as a person of integrity and great skill.