My name is Alya Kovalenko. I was born October 24th, 1986, in Russia. I graduated the State Academy of Economics and Law in Khabarovsk with first class degree in Advertising in 2009. Art came spontaneously into my life. My first drawings I made when I was 20. It was a cleansing process. It was my way to express my hidden feelings and emotions that couldn’t take any other form. I was too reserved to talk about them and even to admit them to myself. That time most of my drawings were black and white. I didn’t see colors. My feelings were in a form of strange images that would appear constantly on the white surface of the sheet of paper. They had very precise shapes, they had faces and eyes, and hands. Among them I could see people from my surrounding and situations from the past. More I drew, more I could understand myself. At this age of my life I got the idea how little we might know about ourselves and how our past experience can take control over our lives and drive it in a very illogical way. This cleansing process took one year.It was my first contact with the world of art. The art became a healing tool, natural remedy coming from my body itself. Later colors came …and this time I became “hungry” for colors. Black and white world was replaced by colorful images. The fear to use colors that was holding me before disappeared. My world became much more joyful and powerful. I was a new “me”, “me” that you meet today. I would say my art has some similarity with a dream state or fairy tale where everything is possible. I believe all images and forms we can ever imagine already exist in the universe. All of them have symbolic meaning for every and each of us. We don’t create them but connect with them and through art give them life in this gross material world.