Milla Petrova(Milla Petrova)(@art_by_milla_creativestudio)

Artist Statement

For me, art is a language — a deliberate act of pausing time to capture life's fleeting beauty. I was born in the former Soviet Union, and the visual world of that childhood, its symbols of order, control, and ideology, remains my raw material. I don't reproduce that iconography so much as interrogate it, asking what we inherit from the systems we're born into and what we choose to do with the symbols we're given. Each composition begins with a visceral spark: a coded symbol, a splash of color, a glance. From there it grows into a world of tension and harmony, where Soviet-era imagery meets the language of our current systems — DNA, surveillance, technology, protest. I work with oil, acrylic, and ink blending meticulous detail with the expressive freedom of contemporary abstraction. The execution stays realistic; the essence stays emotional. What I'm after is the human face at the center of all that machinery. My work treats vulnerability as a form of endurance and memory as something worth preserving — turning the invisible into the tangible, and a private recollection into a timeless image. Whether a piece begins with my own idea or a client's cherished photograph, the goal is the same: to make something that invites you to feel, to remember, and to look more closely.