Totem

Zhyldyz Bekova, a painter and digital artist illustrator. Born and raised in a family of artists Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

She has two educations — secondary, Kyrgyz State Art School named after. S.A. Chuikova, Department of Decorative and Applied Fabrics (from 2005-2009) and higher, Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Construction, Department of Design of Architectural Environment (2009-2015).

Сreate a variety of works of fine art for exhibitions, including paintings, graphic works in liner, watercolor and mixed media. Participant of various state, national and international exhibitions since 2011. She came to oil painting in 2020. The technique of painting gives her works additional expressiveness, the compositions on the canvas looks different and they as like come to life.

In her subjects she uses themes from myths, customs and traditions of Turkic ethnic peoples of Central Asia. She loves to convey Kyrgyz national motifs using the unique cultural heritage. Her ancestors had a rich spiritual heritage — shamans, healers and diviners. One of them was her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her aunt took the baton. People call them koz achyk (from Kyrgyz language mean’s “soothsayer”). She spent all her childhood in that environment, that’s where she attraction to mystical stories and otherworldly visions comes from. She wants to pass on in her paintings her heritage, the time, the man and his place in this system of values.

She has always been concerned about the relationship between nature and man. She believes that man was and still is a part of nature, just a part, a child, but not the main thread of the whole system. But, as we can see, he (man) tries to become the main link. How we forget the mistakes of the past, we forget the real human spiritual and moral values. We ourselves are diligently destroying everything around us with all our might. Nature itself gives us the opportunity to live in harmony, but we ignore it, looking for different ways of superiority over it.