Let's Talk About Art, Baby: A Pair of Portraits by Nastasya Parshina
Celebrating Some of my Favorite Artistry
Perhaps it’s the quiet dream of every crypto art writer that somewhere, somehow throughout their verbal stumblings, they will happen upon that rarest and most coveted of jewels: A concise, comprehensible understanding of what crypto art actually even is. It will just *click*, and in understanding what crypto art is, the writer will soon understand how to save it from itself.
At least, it’s this simple writer’s dream.
Because it’s probably an impossible task, I end up attempting to invent adjacent understandings. Like, no, I’m not able to define or even partly understand crypto art, but maybe if I can pinpoint some shared characteristic of our “greatest” crypto artists, I might enter at least into the country where that “Theory of Crypto Art Everything” resides.
But while trying to find, time and again, some underlying connection between the many most-admired crypto artists, I’m thwarted, time and again, by their copious variety of mediums, styles, moods, processes, marketing tactics, inspirations, materials, networks, everything. They share nothing: Not age, not sensibility, neither intent nor OG status. In my circular journeys, I’ve found only one single even semi-unifying factor, abstract as it may be, and, yes, it's something that is itself mighty subjective, and maybe it’s even contrived, quite possibly forced, but nevertheless here it is:
That which binds together the best of our crypto artists is mere recognizability.
Recognizability, unmistakability, whatever you want to call it, that’s the thing. Between all the artists who garner attention in this space is the immediately identifiable nature of their art. Maybe it’s all just the self-fulfilling prophecy of notoriety, but there is nevertheless something in XCOPY’s glitch (dark, sardonic, cosmically colored ) which differentiates it immediately from its imitators. Could be some kind of attribution error, but Cath Simard’s composite photography (blue, pink, effervescent, depth-warping) does seem to exist on a separate plane —not better or worse, just unique— from others applying similar techniques to similarly-subjected works. Claire Silver, Matt Kane, Hackatao, Sam Spratt, ROBNESS, Osinachi, you can conjure in your mind not just their aesthetics, but the very soul of their work.
It’s important to note that none of these artists appear to have arrived at this distinguished place via the same path, but they congregate there together anyways.
Today I wanted to publicly declare my love for an artist whose work I find as recognizable as any of the who’s-who artists in crypto art, though she’s quite mystifyingly been kept from the illustrious notoriety of her peers. I can’t help but stop and stare as I come upon her works, you can’t miss it or mistake them, always this mastery of portraiture, delicate compositions, soft and precise colors, narrative mystique, and a bizarre ability to match in her photography the texture, the very kind of inimitable canvas sheen, of Renaissance artwork.
I am smitten with the work of Ms. Nastasya Parshina, and I’ve plucked for discussion a pair of her pieces which together seem positively symphonic.
That would be Morning (2023), minted on SuperRare, and Careful listener (2022) from Ms. Parshina’s “Evening Ballad” series:
Artist: Nastasya Parshina
Artwork: Morning
Source Link: https://superrare.com/0x8a1521398214a61bef23e0a2f2909a6a152f9341/morning-632
Date Minted: October 17, 2023
Artist Description: A couple decades ago it was common to take photos agaist the backdrop of carpets. And sometimes it's interesting to take a look at vibes of the past through modern perception. photographer Nastasya Parshina 2022
Artist: Nastasya Parshina
Artwork: Evening ballad: Сareful listener
Source Link: https://nastasyaparshina.eth.co/_/0xf259a3e13703bfa74a317d8897d6b60c663a9c8a/3
Date Minted: August 13, 2022
Artist Description: photographer Nastasya Parshina 2022
Man, don’t you just kind of get it right off the bat? These pieces, they’re just so good. This style, just so beautiful. The ingenuity and the precision. They share nothing, these two pieces, and yet they share so much, rich texts. I could have chosen any two of the dozens and dozens of Ms. Parshina’s pieces I’ve been lucky enough to gawk at, and they share some of the same characteristics: that sense of momentary perfection, of a scene en media res, the smoothness and sleekness and ricocheting colors (green there, green here; red there, red here).
Careful listener, with the glistening skins, captured with almost brushstroke-like swarths of color, and the draped limbs, the draped floral accents, the draped, falling composition; this piece could hang high in the Louvre and not feel out of place with the European masters. Morning, another artwork under sway of gravity, so bold with its color contrast, so mathematical with its angles, so much pop and clinically-calculated exaggeration.
Both pieces share a discernible downward gravity; in Morning it’s there in the voluminous hair and pooling carpetry. In Careful listener it’s the crescent moon positioning of the subjects, the two of them compositionally connected by the curving of an ankle, ankle merging with shadow-darkened thigh, the two bodies seeming to slither singly down the frame like aqueducts depositing liquid one into another. We find fabric, both red and white, dribbling downward as well.
In both cases, you have an implication of continuity: skin connects directly to skin connects to fabric connects to floor all the way down the frame, or carpet becomes face becomes hair becomes more carpet puddling on the hardwood. This feels both deliberate and difficult. In Parshina’s pieces is a kind of Kubrick-esque aesthetic perfection: everything just so, each detail at rest. The waterfalling details form a kind of complete system. This impression is increased by the careful balance struck between colors, reds and greens specifically, diametric residents of the color spectrum, bright hues matched with bright in Morning, delicate and dark all doubled in Careful listener.
Parshina displays a painter’s critical eye in every included object, every fabric fold, every ambiguous facial expression, every curved finger. That she somehow manifests the lightly-reflecting patina of paint-on-canvas is an achievement atop an achievement.
Digital art, photography, contemporary and conceptual art also, they share a similar sin in the eyes of many: the mechanisms of their creation do not obviously communicate the inspiration or craft of their creators. I’m no college professor, but it seems clear to me that this is why laypeople gravitate en masse towards Renaissance paintings and Impressionism, wherein the skill of the painter is so finely and fully overt that anyone, in observing it, can comprehend the many levels of care/conceptualism/ability between themselves and the mastery hanging before them.
But that unmistakeable mastery is equally present in Parshina’s paintings. The canvas itself bends to her will; there is something almost mystical in her affinity for flopping carpet and extended knees. Even nudity bends to her will, stripped of some —but not all— of its sexuality by Parshina’s careful touch. Where she wants mystery, she manifests mystery: In the age and gaze of Morning’s rug-wrapped subject, in the phantasmic fauna exploding out from behind Careful listener’s lute player, in the relationship between us and Morning’s piercing gazer (is she interrogative? inviting? distressed?), or the relationship between she who plays sweet music and she who hears it, a forearm atop a shin, an eyeball resting, where? on instrument or breast or string-picking finger?
I am ensnared by the many mysteries within these two compositions. And they are almost always present in her work, these questions we can almost hear Parshina herself asking us, so clearly are they spoken.
Parshina likes to invite us into small secretive rooms, ones we may not necessarily be welcome in. Its occupants sometimes seem aware of us, as in Morning (seriously, the woman’s icy stare won’t ungrip me), other times blissfully unaware, forcing upon us a sense of voyeurism, or at least that we’re a fly on the wall, uninvited yes but otherwise non-interfering. We approach Parshina’s pieces all the same, as if we are sidling by a slit in a curtain, or seeing a vision behind a window across the way; there is mystery, and that mystery comes when an intriguing scene meets our ignorance of its origins. Or, for that matter, its destination.
We are privy to segments of slices of stories, but with the details Parshina painstakingly places, it’s clear that there is a larger, spicier, more involving story in there anyways. And so we reckon with the limited glimpse of it we get. And our imaginations fill-in the empty implied pasts and futures.
This, maybe, is the soul of Parshina’s style, that identifiable thing twinkling beneath the oil-inspired surfaces of her portrait paintings. There are many painters who have achieved dastardly levels of photorealism in their paintings, but few photographers who have achieved equally remarkable levels of artificiality in their photographs. The subversiveness alone is worthy of appreciation. That it’s pulled off with such aplomb, that is deserving of celebration. And the richness, the depth, the coiled veil of these pieces, that is entitled to something more entirely. Worship maybe. Adulation.
1400-or-so meager words, it’s all I have, but they feel entirely unequipped to interrogate the artist’s magic. I implore you to seek out more of Parshina’s magic. It never lessens in effect. The mysteries remain unsolved, our appetite for them only ever whetted further.