On a damp January morning in 2020 I came upon a paint jam in London’s Leake Tunnel – a mural painting event sponsored by “WOM Collective’” an organization whose mission is to support women in the arts, particularly street art.
Artists answered the call for the free and legal walls, great exposure, and the possibility of meeting up once again with local and international kindred spirits. They came with the necessities. Suddenly the tunnel was awash in aerosol cans, ladders, and a horde of paint-splattered, brush-and-roller toting, hoodie and scrunchy-wearing artists.
When the clusters of participants, on-lookers and gawkers parted, there stood Vesna Parchet (aka VES) sizing up the condition of her allotted wall. She didn’t just miraculously appear to me bathed in a beam of divine light in that gloomy tunnel, nor did she sport a bloody Vincent-ish ear, or drag anyone through a puddle of brilliant blue paint. No, there was nothing so dramatic. The draw was the simple ingenuity of her equipment – an abused paintbrush duct-taped to a freshly cut broomstick.
This gerrymandered extension-pole signalled to me the irrepressible need of an artist to paint. Watching her, it was obvious that VES’ understated confidence rose well above the last minute and kooky arrangement of trays, rollers and bowls filled with leftover house paints that she had scratched together just that morning. Her stage was set.
So after the crowds of enthusiasts and gawkers parted, I slid towards her, took a few photographs, tossed out a few questions, and realized that I had photographed a stand-out piece of her work earlier that month.
VES’ unconventional backstory begins with an early childhood spent in the highly structured society of Tokyo, a city where she admits that she still knows “how to be Japanese”. At the age of 10, her German/Swiss parents received the news of her grandfather’s passing so the family quickly returned to their ancestral home, a farm located near a small agricultural village in Germany. For VES, the overwhelming silence of rural life and the comparatively meagre cultural offerings available, even for a 10 year old, was a major adjustment, but she managed to navigate that vacuum and adapted to the cultural rules of her new country.
At 19 she escaped her personal cultural limbo, and for several years, amid flashes of luck and lightening, she found herself living as a founding member in a dynamic, subject-of-a-documentary, pre-gentrification-East London-ian arts group squat.
Throughout this magical time there were forays to the art-rich European cities of Berlin and Barcelona, mixed with three years of travelling the world culminating with VES’ acquiring a charming but unidentifiable accent and an enviable ability to communicate in several languages.
It is also unmistakable that along with this early exposure to international art and culture, conflated with a passion for contemporary art, 15th to 21st century art publications, and collections of museum-quality print material, the result of this amalgam of the traditional and the modern produced an adept visual communicator, and a painter with a broad informed world view.
Her work is very readable and reflects the harnessed strength that she invests in her paintings, prints, collages and murals. It’s the successfully controlled, almost surgical use of negative space, coupled with that haunting ability to balance colour and shape between blasts of mark-making and clean line-work that draws the eye. It’s that confidence to grab duct tape, slash a broom handle and get it done.
EDUCATION
Bachelor in Fine Art, Middlesex University, London, 2012
National Diploma in Printmaking Techniques, London College of Printing, 2003
BTEC Art & Design, Westminster Kingsway College, London, 2002
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