Visionary artist

Valeria Volnaya

My entire life is a creative journey. For me, creativity is not just drawing or music—it's absolutely everything I do each day, inseparable from feeling. I believe that every person is capable of creative self-expression, giving freedom to the soul, feeling deeply, and thereby finding a strong connection with themselves and inner strength.

I’m originally from Russia: I was born and educated in the Urals, spent eight years in St. Petersburg, and then travelled through Asia for three years. I now live and create in Cambodia.

Spaces of meaning

As an artist, I’m inspired to create not just works of art but visual spaces of meaning and states, where a person can meet something essential within themselves. Decorative and traditional painting have never been at the centre of my interests. Art is a direct extension of my work helping people: here I explore the unmanifest — inner and spiritual worlds, the architecture of the cosmos, states, archetypes, symbols, the deep resources of the human being, and the meanings that sometimes can’t be put into words.

Neo-symbolism

I create where visionary art meets symbolism, in the direction known as neo-symbolism. I’m inspired by states of feeling and by the connection between a person’s inner architecture, nature and the cosmos. For me, the symbol is the language of the soul — a way of speaking with the conscious and the subconscious, with memory and with states of being. So my paintings don’t so much tell stories as create space for inner recognition: they help a person meet what is already within them, remember themselves and feel something essential.

Classical symbolism often looked at inner conflict, emotional turmoil, dreams, fears and the shadow side of human nature. Neo-symbolism looks at what helps a person discover their strengths, their inner resources and their connection to their deepest nature.

ManifestoWhat Is Neo-Symbolism?

How my paintings are born

For me, every painting is both an art project and an alchemical process, where inspiration meets system, flow meets structure, and intuition meets skill.

I paint only what I truly see and feel, through the particular way I perceive the world. Many of the images come to me in meditation and in my work helping people.

Mission

I believe one of the most important things art can do today is help people keep a living, genuine connection with themselves.

We live in a time of fast-moving technology, artificial intelligence and virtual worlds. All of this opens up new possibilities, but it also makes it especially important to protect what is alive and human in us: sensitivity, intuition, the ability to hear ourselves, to feel the world and to remember our deeper nature.

My mission as an artist and visionary is to create works that help keep this connection alive.

I’m most inspired by people with a rich inner world: creators, explorers, visionaries, masters of their craft — people who bring something real and valuable into the world. People who stay true to themselves even in hard times, and keep creating, growing and making their goals and dreams come true, whatever the circumstances. These are the people I love creating for most of all. I can’t just think up an artifact: either I feel a connection — and then something amazing is born — or I don’t, and then I can’t create anything. And that’s completely natural: everyone finds their own master, their own guide back to themselves.

Spirit Code, 2025 Created for His Holiness the Dalai Lama for his 90th birthday

For a person, a family, a lineage

Artifacts

Art artifacts now hold a special place in my practice: unique original paintings created for one particular person or family. Such works become a bridge between a person’s inner world and their deep resources, values, roots and potential.

More about the artifacts

Becoming

Path

My first mandala painted for a person, 2018 — My first mandala for a person, 2018

Drawing has been a hobby of mine since childhood. But my conscious path as an artist began in 2018 in St. Petersburg: it was as if something switched on inside me, completely out of the blue, and I couldn’t stop drawing after that. Right away I began drawing for people — the way I see them from within, through the forms of mandalas. That set my direction, and today it takes the form of artifacts.

Instead of an academic education, I chose independent practice, learning from distinctive artists and people of subtle perception in different countries. For many years I made custom mandalas of the subconscious, and that is what shaped my artistic signature: a central axis, symmetry, layering, attention to symbol, vivid colour and compositional structure.

2018 — 2022

Mandalas

I painted intention mandalas and outline mandalas to order, combining their sacred patterns with crystal healing and meditation.

See more · 56 works

2019 — 2024

Workshops, games and experiments

My practice grew out of workshops, gatherings, transformational games and experiments. I ran mandala therapy workshops and taught many art classes at retreats and seminars, and I created games and metaphor cards from the first idea all the way to print-ready layouts.

2020Studied multi-layered lacquer painting on stone
2020Studied art therapy
2021–2023Ran my own online course every year; in 2023, Art Awakening

See more · 121 photos

2021 — 2024

Painting

In 2021 I moved beyond mandalas and began adding figurative elements. Alongside commissions, I paint my own meanings and states. I painted together with St. Petersburg’s mystic artists and studied technique with classically trained painters.

2023Pop-up solo show with an immersive audio experience — St. Petersburg
2023Solo exhibition, Tutti Quanti gallery — St. Petersburg

See more · 21 works

Since 2024

Sketchbook

This is where the process lives: sketches from travels, places, states and ideas. The same visual language as in my paintings, only raw and unpolished. Browse without trying to find meaning, if you’d like to get to know the way I express myself visually.

See more · 53 photos

For more than eight years, my works have been finding their people in different corners of the world. Today they are in private collections in Russia, India, Thailand, Cambodia, England and Sweden. And every time, I’m inspired by the thought that art can be a quiet visual reminder: you don’t need to look for yourself somewhere outside — everything that matters is already within you. You only have to remember it and stay true to yourself, whatever happens.

I don’t try to give people answers. I’m far more interested in creating works in whose presence people begin to hear their own.

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