Val Vaniakin
About Val
Val Vaniakin is a multimedia artist from Tashkent, Uzbekistan (former USSR). One of the great ancient cities of the Orient, Tashkent is famous for its unique blend of Eastern and Western cultures. This blend shapes Val’s distinctive artistic perspective and techniques, which can be experienced through his watercolor creations.
After studying art for five years, Val had earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1982 at the Uzbekistan Institute of Arts. Over the next few years, he demonstrated his range of techniques in Uzbekistan, working with murals, frescoes, sgraffito, and mosaics. In 1991, Val relocated to Paris, where he began his work as a freelance portrait artist in Montmartre. Along with portraiture, he was commissioned to paint copies of artists such as Salvador Dali and Tamara de Lempicka for private collections.
In 1993, Val had moved to the U.S., where he resumed his art career as a muralist. Combining his knowledge of classical and abstract painting with supergraphics and techniques of trompe l’oeil, he had completed murals for companies such as Harley Davidson, Mike’s Place Irish Pub, Hampton Roads’ Americano Restaurant, and WPEN TV in Newport News. After fulfilling these projects, he was hired by Evergreen Studios for the production of an oil on canvas mural in the Venetian Hotel of Las Vegas. In 2000, Val had moved back to Richmond, VA, where he began displaying his oil landscape paintings in shows such as Neptune and Art in the Park, along with the Kudos and Chasen galleries. Currently, he is continuing his art career with wet on wet watercolor landscape paintings that explore the concepts of ephemerality and spontaneous emotional expression.
Artist Statement
My new series, In, explores the quiet depth of women turned inward. Each figure has her eyes closed, refusing the viewer’s invitation to enter through the gaze. There is no Mona Lisa effect here—no eyes that follow you, no silent conversation with the observer. Instead, the women remain in states of contemplation, their inner worlds veiled and inaccessible. Their faces reveal only fleeting, elusive expressions—clues that invite speculation but never certainty.
This deliberate absence of contact creates distance. We are not participants in their reflection, but witnesses. The viewer becomes an onlooker, drawn into a space of privacy and stillness, left only to imagine what emotions, discoveries, or hidden landscapes unfold behind closed eyes. It is a meditation on the boundary between visibility and secrecy, between external form and interior life.
The surrounding environments are built from sharp geometric shapes, accented with color contrasts and subtle nuances. These clean structures evoke calm and purity, framing the softness of the figures with a sense of balance and clarity. The juxtaposition of geometry and flesh becomes a dialogue: the precision of form against the mystery of emotion.
All works are oil on canvas mounted on aluminum panels. I employed the sfumato technique, pioneered by Leonardo da Vinci, blending and glazing directly on the canvas to achieve softness and fluidity. Yet unlike the Renaissance masters, I pushed the contrasts of light and shadow to a contemporary intensity, sometimes blurring the boundaries into vapor, other times leaving them boldly defined. This play of edges echoes the shifting borders of intimacy and distance within the subjects themselves.
Each painting bears a title beginning with “In”—signaling an inward turn, an exploration of what lies beneath the visible. Together, the works form a collection that resists contact yet invites contemplation, holding space for the private universes within us all.
