NY magazine covers Texas Advertising graduate student - Ekaterina Konovalova

The Ya, a New York magazine that reaches the Russian-speaking population across North America, published an article about the artistic achievements of one of our graduate students, Ekaterina Konovalova. Ekaterina, originally from Russia, is a graduate student majoring in advertising at Texas Advertsiing. Recently, she became a part of the Art of Inspiration - Vladimir Andreyev and His Friends group, an international collaboration among sixty artists and photographers from two countries - Russia and USA. This group has already taken the work of these artists through large and small cities in Russia and the USA, and is now successfully expanding in the international arena.

In her interview, Ekaterina said: "I started to draw in infancy when I learned to crawl. I used the materials on hand, from jam to grass to flowers smeared together trying to replicate my visions on walls, paper and anything else I could reach. Once, my father lost sight of me and I turned our newly-painted house into a giant mural with my childhood fantasies. Fortunately, my parents were pretty wise people, and instead of punishment -or perhaps as a punishment - they sent me off to art school."

"At the art school, I was an obstinate student and always had conflicts with teachers arguing about color usage. It was Soviet Russia, and everybody had to be the same. I was usually inclined to use vivid colors instead of natural gradations trying to cultivate my own style."

Prior coming to the University of Texas at Austin, Ekaterina lived in Massachusetts where she received a Masters Degree in Community Social Psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. While she was working towards her Masters, Ekaterina joined the Arts League of Lowell, and became an avid contributor to the city's development. Her public art projects, exhibited in downtown Lowell, and oil paintings from local galleries were featured in various TV programs and newspaper articles.

In spite of her work in the graduate program and active involvement in academic research, she continues to generate artistic ideas. Her creative outlook and passion about the arts became contagious, as she has recently begun collaborating with her fellow advertising graduate student and professional photographer, Bill Reeves. Bill and Ekaterina are currently working on their new project Artistic Parallels, where they will try to recreate Ekaterina's oil reality in photographs.