Two or Three Days, Then Leave It
By Nataliia Ivaniv
There is a rule Nataliia Ivaniv keeps about finished paintings. She gives herself two or three days after setting a canvas aside. If nothing demands to be changed within that window, she does not touch it again. Returning to a work six months later and reworking it, she said, is a kind of overconfidence. Better to leave the imperfect thing fixed in time and start fresh on a new canvas with new ideas.
It is a practical rule, and the way she stated it was practical too, without ceremony. Ivaniv is a painter based in Ivano-Frankivsk, in western Ukraine, working primarily in acrylic on canvas with a technique built on heavy impasto and dense layering. She graduated from the Lviv art school in 2020 and has been showing group work across Ukraine in 2026, with exhibitions at BB Gallery in Odesa, the Ivano-Frankivsk Center for Contemporary Art, Gallery Zag in Lviv, and Tonki Materii in Odesa. Before painting was her main occupation, she worked as a UI/UX designer, and that transition shapes how she talks about her practice, though not always in the ways her artist statement might suggest.
The conversation, conducted in Ukrainian, kept returning to specific decisions inside specific paintings. When I asked about the diptych Azure Flow N2 (2026, acrylic on canvas, each panel 30 x 30 cm), she described a long hesitation over whether to introduce pink into a composition that had been running entirely in blues. The work was too boring without it, she said. When she finally added the pink, it went in the upper right corner. She had not planned that placement in advance. The internal sense that something was off-balance told her where to put it, and when the balance shifted, she knew to stop. The diptych format itself raised the stakes of that decision: a single accent colour placed in one panel had to carry across the join and still read as part of a unified composition. She did not describe that pressure explicitly, but it was present in the precision with which she recalled the corner, the colour, and the moment the work settled.
She paints on the floor. The reason is practical: she needs the resistance of a hard surface beneath the canvas when she is working with impasto. She described laying a canvas flat, building it up quickly because acrylic dries fast, then standing the work vertical and stepping back. The distance changes everything. Up close, she is solving local problems. From across the room, the composition resolves or it does not. She said she always knows which side is the bottom before she begins; she does not rotate canvases looking for a better orientation the way some painters do. The bottom tends to be heavier in her work, denser in pigment and more thickly applied, and this is not an accident. It is, she said, her natural handwriting.
The two-to-three-day rule has a specific texture to it. During that period she hangs the painting on the wall and watches it across different hours, in different light, checking it from every angle. Sometimes an internal signal arrives: fix this. She described those moments as a kind of insight, quiet and sudden, rather than a reasoned conclusion. When no such signal comes, the painting is done. The problem, she acknowledged, is that the signal can be unreliable, especially early in a practice. The eye for knowing when something is finished is itself a skill that develops with repetition, like any other skill. You train it by doing the work.
Her process in the later stages of a painting is deliberately slow. She talked about what she learned at school in Lviv: begin with intuition, move quickly through the first half of a canvas, then decelerate as you approach the finish. The closer you are to done, the higher the risk of adding too much. In Rose Tempest (2025, acrylic on canvas), the final colour she introduced was turquoise. She had debated bringing it in at all, and when she did, she thinned it down so it would sit into the surface rather than sit on top of it, absorbed rather than applied. The moment she knew she was finished was when the composition stopped asking for anything. "When the accents are placed and the composition starts to breathe with the other colours," she told me, "that's it. The main thing is not to get carried away and keep adding."
The multi-layer technique she uses means that earlier decisions stay visible beneath later ones. A ground goes down first, then another layer over that, then another, and each previous layer shows through wherever the upper one does not fully cover it. She chooses, at each stage, whether to cover an area completely or leave parts of the lower surface exposed. This is the part of the process she described with the most evident interest: the decisions about partial coverage, about what gets buried and what remains legible. The layers accumulate into something that reads as time passing, though she is careful not to overclaim this. She said, simply, that she finds it genuinely interesting.
Nuances N2 (2024, acrylic on canvas) sits earlier in the portfolio and shows the same logic applied at a smaller scale of incident. The title points to what the painting is actually doing: testing how much can shift within a narrow tonal range before the eye registers a change in atmosphere rather than just a change in colour. Ivaniv described her practice as organised around limited colour relationships producing complex emotional results, and this work is where that ambition is most compressed. The impasto ridges catch light differently depending on where you stand, so the painting's mood is partly a function of the viewer's position — something she said she thinks about when she is deciding how thickly to load a given area.
The comparison she drew between painting and her earlier work in digital design was concrete and unromantic. In UX work, you finish a task, you close the laptop, and the thing disappears into a server somewhere. A canvas stays. You can come back to it the next day and it is still there. That physical persistence is part of what drew her back to painting, and she said it plainly, without nostalgia for the design work or contempt for it. She liked that too. The difference is the object.
The group exhibition at Tonki Materii in Odesa in 2026 was among the first times her work appeared alongside painters working at a comparable scale of ambition in a southern Ukrainian context. She listed it as a key achievement without elaborating on what the experience was like, but the geography matters: Odesa has a different relationship to abstraction than Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk, and showing there placed her work in a conversation she had not previously been part of. The same year brought the Ivano-Frankivsk Center for Contemporary Art, Gallery Zag in Lviv, and BB Gallery in Odesa — four group shows in twelve months for a painter who has been working seriously at this for around two years.
When I asked whether her relationship to a finished painting changes over time, she said it does, but the change is in her, not in the work. While she is making something, she described the attachment as parental — the way you feel about something you are in the middle of creating. Once she steps away, that bond weakens. It does not disappear, but it loosens, and the loosening is what makes critical distance possible. "The emotional connection doesn't disappear," she said, "it fades. And you start to see it more critically."
Her portfolio of fifteen works sits mostly in the last two years. The titles — Violet Reverie, Pink Abstract, Rose Tempest, Azure Flow N2 — suggest a practice organised around colour relationships rather than subject matter, which matches how she talks about the work. She described her paintings as tending toward landscape in their internal logic, with the lower register heavier and more grounded, but she does not paint landscapes in any representational sense. The weight at the bottom is a feeling, expressed through density of paint and depth of colour.
She is, by her own account, a visual thinker first. When I asked whether she knows a painting is finished by looking or by touch, she said looking, without hesitation. She acknowledged that texture matters and that she works with it constantly, but the final judgement is always visual. She takes in information through her eyes more than any other channel, and this is true of how she moves through the world generally, not of how she assesses paint on canvas alone.
"With practice," she said, toward the end of our conversation, "your eye gets trained. You start to see when, and what."
Discover more of Nataliia Ivaniv's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.