Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery is extremely pleased to announce that Anastasiia Yatsunenko has been named as the Gallery’s new featured artist and she will now be promoted by the gallery for the next 14 days in the gallery’s Artist Showcase.
Anastasiia is an award-winning artist based in Florida, USA. She was selected as 1 of the top twelve finalists in the gallery’s 34th Solo Art Exhibition Series. The placement in this competition qualified her work to be showcased in this feature.
Her Artist Showcase feature will be promoted to hundreds of major news outlets. In addition, the gallery will also be featuring and promoting her artwork in the gallery’s various social media networks for further exposure.
Below are Anastasiia’s Artist Biography, Artist Statement and 5 of her koi series artwork submitted to this competition.
Anastasiia Yatsunenko is a Ukrainian visual artist currently based in Florida, United States. Formally trained in fine art, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and has developed a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, mixed media, and three-dimensional resin art.
Born and raised in Ukraine, Yatsunenko began studying art at an early age and continued her education through formal artistic training and university studies. Following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, she was forced to leave her home country and relocate to the United States through the Uniting for Ukraine (U4U) program. This profound transition reshaped both her life and her relationship with art. Her creative practice became not only a means of expression, but also a way to process change, preserve a sense of continuity, and rebuild a connection with the world around her.
Yatsunenko works with oil, acrylic, watercolor, epoxy resin, and mixed media. Her practice combines traditional foundations in drawing, painting, color, and composition with experimentation in materials, texture, transparency, light, and dimensional form. She is particularly interested in work that exists between painting and three-dimensional art, where physical depth and changing reflections become active elements of the viewer’s experience.
Since continuing her artistic career in the United States, Yatsunenko has participated in juried exhibitions and art competitions, and her work has appeared in art publications. Her artwork has been exhibited in Florida, New York, and Colorado and has received recognition in international art competitions.
Florida’s subtropical environment has become an important source of inspiration in her recent work. Its waterways, ponds, wetlands, aquatic vegetation, wildlife, and constantly changing light have encouraged a deeper exploration of nature and the relationship between visible surfaces and the worlds that exist beneath them.
Across her practice, Yatsunenko explores memory, transformation, emotional resilience, nature, and the search for inner equilibrium. Through both traditional and experimental media, she seeks to create works that invite viewers to slow down, observe closely, and experience a moment of contemplation.
My koi series grew from a search for stillness during a period of profound change in my life. After moving to the United States and beginning to rebuild my life, art increasingly became a place where I could slow down, reflect, and restore a sense of inner balance.
Living in Florida brought me into constant contact with water. Ponds, lakes, wetlands, aquatic plants, wildlife, and changing reflections became part of my everyday environment. I became fascinated by the quiet experience of observing these places. Water can appear completely still while an entire world continues moving beneath its surface. That contrast became the emotional foundation of this series.
I was also inspired by Japanese culture and the visual tradition surrounding koi. Their associations with perseverance, strength, transformation, and good fortune resonated with my own experience, while their graceful movement through water embodied the tranquility I wanted these works to convey.
Creating each piece is a slow and technically demanding process. I work with epoxy resin in multiple pours, using appropriate respiratory protection, protective gloves, and careful handling while the material is uncured. A single work may contain three to seven layers of clear resin, with approximately twelve hours or more required before I can continue to the next stage. As a result, one piece can develop over several weeks.
Between these transparent layers, I build the underwater environment by hand. Koi may be painted progressively with acrylics across multiple levels, allowing parts of the same fish to occupy different physical depths. I also paint aquatic plants, lilies, algae, stones, and details of the pond floor. Some compositions incorporate real stones or separately created three-dimensional koi forms, which I cast in resin, finish, paint, and then integrate into the work.
I experiment with inks and reflective effects within the resin, including gold, silver, and color-shifting pigments that become visible only from particular angles. Because light travels through and reflects across several transparent levels, the image changes as the viewer moves around it. Details can appear, disappear, brighten, or shift in color.
The final clear layer becomes more than a protective surface. For me, it completes the illusion of water—a reflective boundary between the viewer and the world beneath it.
The lengthy process itself has become meditative. Pouring, waiting, painting, and returning repeatedly to the same underwater world requires patience and concentration. Each work captures a different moment of that experience, but together they form one continuous environment: a quiet window into another world, where movement exists without urgency and stillness is full of life.
To see more of Anastasiia’s work, visit her website.
Click the Thumbnail to See the Artwork in a Lightbox
