Quick Take
More than a year after settling into life in Santa Cruz, Ukrainian painter Natalia Aandewiel, 27, has successfully integrated herself into the Rolodex of local artists. Aandewiel travels all over the county attempting to capture the region’s beauty in her art. She has battled cancer and worked to bring her family to the U.S. after they fled to Poland for safety.
Santa Cruz County’s giant redwoods, limitless ocean vistas and near-perfect weather offer a constant muse and an artistic haven for Natalia Aandewiel after fleeing her war-torn home in Ukraine.
More than a year after settling into life on the Central Coast, Aandewiel, 27, has successfully integrated herself into the Rolodex of local artists. When she isn’t in her home studio in Aptos, she can often be found by the water painting seascapes.
Aandewiel travels all over the county attempting to capture its beauty in her art. Her paintings, mostly in oil, are currently on exhibit at Miritz Real Estate in Santa Cruz and at Enterprise Sports Club in Scotts Valley. Right now, she sells her art locally through exhibitions and also through her website. While her customers are mostly from the surrounding area, she sells to people from all over the world, including the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Italy.
Born in Odessa and raised in Uman, a city in central Ukraine, and Kyiv, Aandewiel arrived in Santa Cruz in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that February.
It was Aandewiel’s second time living in California. In 2018 she had moved to Los Angeles, where she earned money painting murals inside homes.
Coming to California for the first time, Aandewiel imagined what it must have felt like to be among the state’s earliest artists. As she painted the landscapes she encountered, she felt akin to those who painted California as they were seeing it for the first time. Like them, Aandewiel painted to understand the Golden State.
“Everything they saw, they saw for the first time in their life. Those paintings are valuable, vibrant and alive because they were so mesmerized and amazed by [the landscape],” Aandewiel says. “I love early California paintings because they exude that energy and excitement. I somewhat relate to those because of that.”
However, art, Aandewiel felt, was not very lucrative, especially in Los Angeles. In 2020, she returned to Ukraine to be with family. When the Russian military began attacks on her hometown of Uman in early 2022, Aandewiel, along with her mother, sister and younger brother fled to Poland to stay with friends.
With no immediate hope of returning safely to their homeland, Aandewiel contacted friends from Santa Cruz whom she had met at a student conference in Germany six years prior. The friends had been living near Scotts Valley and had planned to leave their house for a month. With housing in sight, Aandewiel used the green card she was granted in 2018 to return to the U.S. Her mother, father and two younger siblings eventually joined her in Santa Cruz and were granted temporary legal status under Uniting for Ukraine, a U.S. government initiative that allows Ukrainian citizens fleeing the war to live in the United States for up to two years.
Before her arrival in Santa Cruz, Aandewiel spent most of her life training as an artist. She studied at the Florence Classical Arts Academy in Italy, then completed her master of fine arts degree at the Ukrainian National Academy of Fine Arts.
Aandewiel says her classical training, which focused on the study of the anatomy of a painting and the implementation of rigid art rules, was a product of the Soviet Union’s pursuit of realism. Art under the Soviet Union was taught to portray the truth, reflecting an exact replica of a subject. While Aandewiel did not study art under the Soviet Union, her teachers were from that generation, so a lot of her coursework encompassed painting with accuracy and attention to detail, considered vital aspects of realism.
However, Aandewiel does not care much for telling the truth in her art. In defiance of her education, Aandewiel has dabbled in all forms of art, including a brief stint learning animation at a school in Denmark.
“What I’ve been doing now is not thinking about any of those rules when I paint,” says Aandewiel. “It’ll always be in the back of my head but when I paint, I don’t think at all.”
Not thinking at all is an important aspect of Aandewiel’s art. Rather, her art is a framework for her feelings. Instead of painting based on rules, she paints when she feels strong emotions. It’s where her fascination with synesthesia comes from. Synesthesia is the neurological phenomenon where stimulation of one sense can trigger a response from another. For example, those who experience chromesthesia, a subtype of synesthesia, correlate different sounds with colors. Frank Ocean’s critically acclaimed album “Channel Orange” uses this to depict falling in love — a feeling he associates with the color orange.
Aandewiel doesn’t experience synesthesia herself, yet the creation of her recent artwork relies heavily on the concept. Aandewiel uses the emotions she feels at the intersection of all of the forms of art she explores — dancing, playing the piano, painting — as the basis of this concept. This is how she explores synesthesia in her art work.
“Only when I paint, I experience this state where I can’t think of anything … I can feel free and happy. It’s helped me through everything I’ve experienced so far. I experience the same state when I play piano and dance.” Aandewiel says. “Synesthesia for me is the same state I feel when I’m doing all of those three things.”
Regardless of the state of mind, synesthesia still requires you to have it to be able to articulate it through artwork. For this, Aandewiel turned to research. In an attempt to capture the essence of synesthesia in her art, she uses researcher Richard Abbott’s work on the method of translating music notes into shades of colors. She used this to link colors to the musical notes of symphonies by Sergei Rachmaninoff. In Aandewiel’s work, warm colors correlate to the major tonalities of a song, and colder colors to the minor tonalities.
In all of the stress of leaving her home and moving to another country, Aandewiel finds escape in her art. The state she inhibits when painting keeps her going, excites her each day. It is the one constant in a life of constant change.
Late 2022, she was diagnosed with cancer – lymphoma – from which she is currently recovering under the care of local doctors. She found that her art was crucial in her steps to recovery.
After living in Santa Cruz, she finds it hard to want to return to Ukraine. The war has left her and her family shaken, unable to anticipate returning to what was once their home, before it was damaged by the bombs.
“There isn’t much money for art [in Ukraine],” Aandewiel’s mother, Olga, says. “Some people don’t really care about it that much.”
Aandewiel’s outlook on life is romantic, filled with color and beauty. She recounts a time in the 10th grade, when she was so enamored by Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” that she drew a self-portrait in that style. It’s the same romantic view she brings to the mountains of Santa Cruz County.
“I always dreamed about water, and the ocean,” says Aandewiel. “I always dreamed about amazing huge trees and forests and summer the whole year. This place is heaven. It’s so romantic and so inspiring, and it reflects in my paintings.”
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