Anastasia Alexandrin: The Alchemist of Charcoal and Light
Anastasia Alexandrin does not make drawings. She makes incantations—spellbound conjurings of flesh and feather, grit and grace, the seen and unseen. Her work exists in that ephemeral, gasping moment between becoming and vanishing, where figures emerge like half-remembered dreams and dissolve just as quickly.
Her medium is charcoal, that most unforgiving and exquisite of materials—black as memory, volatile as breath. And yet, in her hands, it becomes something else: gold, vapor, spirit. She works in whispers and shadows, in the delicate tension between line and absence, conjuring forms that feel less like they were drawn and more like they always existed, waiting for someone with the right touch to unearth them.
Born in Ukraine and shaped by the restless highways of America, Alexandrin knows a thing or two about movement, metamorphosis, and the quiet power of resilience. She has lived the myth of the artist—not the sanitized version, but the real one. The one that involves highways, motel rooms, lean years, and sheer, unrelenting will. And her work reflects it: bold, unflinching, tender when it needs to be, but never timid.
There’s something cinematic about her figures—women in transit, drifters with haunted gazes, creatures that might be human or might be something else entirely, but they all share the same quiet knowledge: everything changes. They are always in flux, never static, and that is where the magic happens.
To own an Anastasia Alexandrin piece is to own a moment of becoming, caught in the fragile tension between shadow and light. It is to witness an artist who does not flinch in the face of transformation—who welcomes it, invites it in, and lets it breathe across the paper like a secret you’ve always known but never quite had the words for.
Until now.
"My motto is bringing back the pencil one line at a time. People have forgotten that we use pencils. We're going into digital art and giant installations. But there's something beautiful about drawing and it's a real skill and passion for people like me!"
Anastasia Alexandrin