We had the good fortune of connecting with NATASHA KERTES and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi NATASHA, what are you inspired by?

I live in a transfigured world of the imagination, where history is metamorphosed into legend, where myths are interpreted in raptures.   Mankind lives in secular spasms, with birth and rebirth of mythical unveiling, the infinite, the unreal, the fantastic, nostalgia, disillusionment, life and death.  I am heavily inspired by mythology and history, human body and nature.  I am fully immersed in dreams of antiquity, in the ancient corruption, where I am completely spellbound, when I capture my Gods and Goddesses daily.  The woman who, almost without changing, was in turn Salome, Helen of Troy, Delilah, the Chimera, Semele, became the incarnation of them all.  From them I draw my power, fixing my features in eternity.

We couldn’t define ourselves as human beings if we didn’t have the capacity to fantasies.  This is what separates us from other species.  The ancients believed that a sense of the fantastic-i.e., an imagination-meant power, skill, virtue.  To hide from ourselves the state of decadence we have reached, would be the height of senselessness.  Religion, morals, justice, everything is decadent, undergoing unavoidable transformation.  Society is disintegrating, corrupted by a deliquescent civilisation.  Modern man is blaséé. Refinements of appetite, sensation, luxury and pleasure; neurosis, hysteria, hypnotism, morphinomania, scientific charlatanism, out-and-out Schopenhauerism- such are the premonitory signs of social change, new ideas, nuances, necessity of creating complex feelings and physiological sensations, – Political decadence leaves us cold.

Art, like all the arts, evolves.  It does so according to a pattern, with repetitions which are strictly determined, and which vary in accordance with changes brought about by the passage of time and social upheaval.  Every new phase in the evolution of art corresponds exactly to the senility.  Every artistic manifestation is bound to become impoverished and exhausted; and then, with one copy after another, one imitation after another, what was once full of vigour and freshness dries up and withers; what was new and spontaneous becomes platinudinous, cliché.

I am addicted to Myths and Surrealism, mystical phantasms, from ancient rocks to Titania’s forests, and ancient deserts, strains of the mixolydian modes of barbitons and 8 stringed lyres, gusli, and Azan.  There is nothing in Nature has more character than a human body.  In its strength or grace-evocation of a body resembles a flower: the bending of the torso imitating the stem, the timelessness of the breasts, the luster of the hair of full bloom corolla.  Delicate curvatures, or strength of the muscles, -he and she are my Gods and Goddesses, when the human body bends backwards like a spring and a bow, on which “Eros aims his invisible arrows”.  To love.

Traveling envelops me like a sound, based on liberty: liberty of life and thought, liberty to exist and to enjoy.


Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?

Born in Klin, Russia in the 70’s I always had a strong inclination towards visual arts from the young age. Childhood spent in the Georgian mountains or Russian villages with birch trees and crab apples, wheat fields and hills that wore a thick blanket of grass, begging you to roll through its cushy bed to the ribbon like river far below was intermixed with mournful anthems, stone monuments and pioneer camps. At 13, I ran away for the whole summer to South of Russia, where the civil war was breaking up, with my soul forever seeking adventures returning to Moscow same fall to find a town in thrall to new money and old traditions, covered in ice and snow-and well lubricated with vodka. But I never drink alcohol.  

For Moscow, the 90’s were a hybrid of many things- the rampant crime of Chicago in the ‘20s, the economic distress of Berlin in the ‘30s, the intrigue of Casablanca in the ‘40s and the hedonistic excess of Saigon in the ‘60s.

I rented a great apartment above rambling Russian supermarket, among apple trees, on the edge of a park in South Moscow. I had a wide mattress on the floor in front of tall windows that could be pushed and dragged open onto a roof of the supermarket. I lived on that mattress as on a draft. I gathered my books, poetry, paintings, food, anything I needed or wanted around me on the floor, reaching out for things from under guilt when it was cold, and in summer, sprawling across the sunlit sheets to catch the sun spill across my body.
Raised in suburbs of Moscow, theaters, operas and galleries were common life those days simultaneously with hardships and collapse of the Communism that brought me to US in dreams of studies. Marriage is like being on a diet: When receiving the advances of a gentleman who’s not your husband, you are allowed a nibble of baloney, but darling, don’t go for the whole salami, which ended me up seeking freedom and adventures again.

Painting for fun turned into a small great business but after few years, when I turned 33, I decided to pursue photography, when, upon my graduation from Art Institute in Ft. Lauderdale 2 years later made me realized, – I found my true passion and as a Russian tank I propelled through all barriers and hardships and struggles, all thanks to my Russian stamina and stubbornness.

At first photography was a way to freedom and means of support raising 2 kids as a single mother, simultaneously becoming an obsession and the ultimate passion to arts. If left alone in a strange environment with no models I turn myself into experiment on sensuality and capture myself as all forms of femininity.

That’s what I see in my camera’s eye and find in light’s magical chemistry as mechanism for dreaming.

Building my name through 20 hour a day work and sleepless nights, my days have no day or night light, no holidays no weekends. Styling, searching for locations, reading and writing, running to meetings and every day motherly chores life became a one big roller coaster with no end, a drug, an obsession. As a woman, a mother, an artist I keep working as an escape from the pains of the past or current present, creating story telling styled editorials and art shows.

Currently, I am working on my solo show LOVE PROJECT, which I would love to present to the world this autumn, a creative series of contemporary portraiture and love scenes.


Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.

Oh, My Magical home/studio/gallery, of course.  In the midst of colossal aerial buildings, with neither foundations nor roof tops,  -my balcony is quivering with vegetation, the sacred flora of my own grown healing herbs, standing out against sky blues of the starry vaults and the deserts of Miami sunsets, the God so often invoked appears in his still veiled splendor in winds, rains, grey tropical mists, and heat…. From my own balcony, eagle of Jupiter, the great Pan, symbol of Earth, mourning his slavery and exile, at night… making my guests exhale in beauty….

Here, in my humble space, in utter silence, I dream of harmonies.  My art photography on every wall, on every empty space in natural fragrances exhilarates my guests, the joy I breathe in with it: Gods and Goddesses of my models, humans of all in statuesque rigidity; inexpressibly unique, august, religious in the rhythm of their gesture, in their rare immobility.  My living space is filled with my Art, The Primitives, Gothic, nudity, legends, Nordic tales and Russian sagas, medieval ballads, Greek and roman mythology- and aspects of daily life, conventional scenes, sexuality, desire, non-conformism, Roman Catholism and Christianity, myths.

Cooking is my other obsession, I cook with all my senses, so there is no better place in Miami to eat and drink as my food loaded home, where I create international and exotic dishes and amuse people’s pallets. Exotic herbs and teas from around the world, spices, saffron and flowers-all mixed in dishes to make my guests “soaring away” with their head tilted towards Gods, feeding on Russian caviar of Pushkin.  An Artist must act.   So, there is no better place then bringing my guests to my art loaded home, to tell ancient myths and stories, and feed them with magical foods and my art, sophisticated, complicated, enigmatic dreams, radically opposed to that of realism, the anguished fulfillment of incestuous desire…


The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?

Life is such a gift, and to give something back to it by becoming more – I bore two children-my treasures, -my son and my daughter.  I owe it to them.  They are my gathered scattered pollen, my two most beautiful flowers, my joyous birds.  I learned my solitude through them, breastfeeding each, when they were born. They came into existence by drinking their mother’s milk, thus, during the process, I learned silence of God.  My kids were my poetry, my solitude, my bliss, the most complete version of the universal inspiration.  Through them I continued dreaming… they encompassed the spectrum of all emotions and made my life a meaning by flying all over the world, experiencing my wondrous journey yet always coming back to my nest, their safest harbor.  As Kahlil Gibran wrote:” Your children are not your children.  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.  They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. “

Website: www.natashakertes.com

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