The hardest element in Dandy Divine — Authorship was a chalice. Not the figure holding it, not the angel wing curving behind her, but the cup itself, which Mariana had filled with a single open eye. It is an image drawn from the iconography of seraphim — angels depicted, in certain traditions, as wheels of eyes rather than winged humanoids. Getting that chalice to sit correctly in the composition, to read as a natural extension of the figure's hand rather than something pasted on top of her, took more passes than Mariana can now recall. She wanted the spiritual and surrealist vision rendered whole, she said, speaking in Ukrainian from her home in Lviv — not assembled, not applied, but grown into the image from the inside.
Mariana is self-taught. She came to digital art seriously only in the last few years, and Architects of Reality — a collection of ten works, each representing a stage of personal transformation — is her first complete body of work. The pieces are built in Photoshop, starting from an AI-generated base image that she treats as a rough sketch rather than a finished product. The human figure comes from that base. Everything else — the backgrounds, the clothing, the objects, the light — she constructs herself.
She described the process with some precision: she builds cosmic landscapes, textures, symbolic details, and then rebuilds them, repeatedly, until the image holds together as a single thing. A finished piece takes roughly a week to two weeks of work. She doesn't track how many layers she uses. "I don't even think about it," she said. "I just try, layer masks, arrange, combine colours. Sometimes I don't even know the name of the technique anymore. I just do it."
That answer is worth sitting with. Mariana's technical knowledge came from practice, from Photoshop's own logic, and from additional study in Blender and 3D visualisation. What she describes is a workflow that has become largely intuitive, where the named tools have dissolved into muscle memory. The risk with that kind of fluency is that the work can start to look like facility. The question with Mariana is whether the symbolic program she has set herself — archetypes, transformation stages, spiritual imagery — gives the images enough structural resistance to push back against the ease.
Looking at Dandy Divine, the answer is at least partly yes. The palette is pastel: soft blue, blush pink, muted lilac, with touches of pale gold. Mariana called it the most delicate piece in the collection, and she described how the blue anchored everything else — not a flat sky blue, but one with a turquoise inner light, as though the colour were illuminated from behind. She brought the remaining tones — the rose, the lilac, the faint gold — into alignment with that anchor, keeping all of them within the same soft register so that nothing pulled against the others. The same luminous quality appears in the spiral vortex positioned at the figure's chest, which Mariana built to suggest the heart chakra: energy radiating outward and filling the space around the figure. She worked on that spiral until it stopped reading as a separate element. "I saw that it had become part of the whole picture," she said, "and that it wasn't standing apart."
The spiral, like the chalice, took iteration. Mariana wanted it to glow — not simply to be turquoise, but to carry a turquoise inner light, the way the chalice carries gold. She compared the two elements directly: the cup has its gilded luminescence, and the vortex at the heart has its bioluminescent blue-green. Both are lit from within. Both are meant to suggest that the figure is not merely posed in a symbolic environment but is herself a source of the energy the image depicts. Getting the spiral to hold that reading without detaching visually from the surrounding pastels was, she said, one of the most technically demanding moments in the entire collection.
The practical problem she kept returning to, across all ten works, was coherence. She used the Ukrainian word for "organic" several times — she wanted each image to look as though it had always existed in that form, not assembled from parts. The technical challenge was blending: making the layers of a composite image sit in the same light, breathe the same air. She solved it through colour temperature and through what she called glow — a luminous haze, sometimes smoke-like, that she added to most of the pieces as a final pass before colour correction. In Moonlight Madame — Purification, that glow rises from the chalice the figure holds and from the figure herself.
Moonlight Madame is the louder work. Where Dandy Divine keeps everything in the soft register, Moonlight Madame moves into fuchsia, ultraviolet, and deep lavender. Mariana described the character as carrying a specifically feminine energy — magnetic, charismatic, unsubtle. The moon sits inside the chalice here, a symbol she chose deliberately for its association with feminine cycles and inner power. Asked whether the fuchsia arrived in the same intuitive flow as the rest of the collection, she said it did: all ten works came from the same internal state, the same unbroken period of making. "I can't say the flow changed," she told me. "Each piece is connected to the others, but each one is its own."
The third piece currently available, Euphoria Alchemist — Presence (2025), extends the same visual logic: a figure in a constructed environment, surrounded by symbolic objects and coloured light, presented as an archetype rather than a portrait. All three works are produced as museum-quality pigment prints, face-mounted to acrylic with Dibond backing, and designed for large-format physical display. Mariana has a particular interest in luxury hospitality and residential contexts, which places her work in a specific commercial conversation. That context matters, because it shapes the kind of symbolic weight the images are asked to carry: these are not gallery pieces meant to be stood in front of for twenty minutes. They are meant to live with people, to be in the room every day. The iconography she draws on — chakras, angels, archetypes of transformation — has to function at that ambient register, which is a different demand than the white-cube encounter.
Whether it does depends partly on the viewer's tolerance for spiritual imagery handled without irony. Mariana is not working in that mode. She means the chalice with the eye. She means the vortex at the heart. Her artist statement describes beauty as "a conscious and transformative force — a way of redirecting attention from victimhood towards authorship, from limitation towards possibility." That is a position, not a slogan, and it comes from somewhere specific in her own history, though she kept that history mostly offstage during our conversation.
What she was willing to talk about was the making. The ten characters in Architects of Reality represent stages she says she has lived through herself — decision, collapse, rebirth, presence, authorship among them. Dandy Divine was the first piece she completed, and she described starting it without a plan, sitting down and working until the image appeared. The creative decisions came from somewhere other than deliberate thought, she said. The technical ones — how to make the turquoise light glow from inside the spiral without the spiral detaching from the rest of the image — required conscious effort and iteration. The whole collection, all ten works, was made in what she described as a single unbroken flow, beginning with Dandy Divine and running through to the final piece without the internal current shifting.
Mariana has also said that the characters in the collection are mature — she is interested in magnetic figures beyond a certain age, in personal power that does not depend on youth. That is a real curatorial decision in a field where the idealised figure tends to run young. Whether it registers as such in the finished images, or whether the digital rendering softens the specificity, is a question the work raises without fully settling. The figures are rendered with the same luminous unreality as everything else in the frame — they are archetypes, not individuals — but the intention behind them is particular, drawn from Mariana's own experience of transformation rather than from an abstract idea of what a symbolic figure should look like.
When I asked what she added last to Moonlight Madame, before the final colour correction, she answered without hesitation: the glow and the smoke rising from the chalice. It was almost always the last thing, she said — in nearly every piece in the collection. The image is built, the layers are integrated, the colour is mostly there, and then she adds the luminous haze that makes the whole thing read as lit from within. After that, colour correction to balance everything.
"Art has learned how to reveal the wound," she said. "Now it can reveal a new reality."
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