Olga Anaskina's Landscape Paintings

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Join us as we explore how Olga Anaskina's landscape paintings describe specific places in Costa Rica, exemplifying atmosphere, gesture, and tempo in response to the country's changing weather patterns.

At this point in the year, as the light changes and the green season moves through its quieter weeks (quieter in visitor numbers, not in weather, which can be exceptionally torrential at times!), her work feels particularly resonant.

Weather as Colour

Olga's recent worksm such as Isla Misteriosa and El Lugar Que Habito, present compositions built from layers of translucent paint, thinly applied and often interrupted. The results are patchworks of tone and movement, where decisions remain visible. Paint appears to have been laid down quickly and then reconsidered, or worked back into over time. The colours, from chalky lilac, greyed blue, to washed-out yellow, recall humid light and long afternoons in Costa Rica.

Olga Anaskina, El Lugar Que Habito, Oil on canvas

In this way, her paintings echo the slow movement of weather, and the steady presence of cloud and heat, the gradual fade or thickening of light. I feel there is a kind of visual slowness in her work despite the energetic brushwork, something closer to how we experience duration than how we remember place. They feel tied to the season by mood and feeling.

Olga's titles sometimes reference specific places or regions in Costa Rica, places that personally resonate with her. Yet, her style of painting makes any specific sense of space difficult to decipher; she offers little orientation, deliberately distorting features. There are few landmarks, no consistent horizon, no definitive vanishing point. Instead, her landscape paintings unfold as suggestions of form. What looks like a tree line might also be a brushstroke. A clearing might be the result of wiped-away paint.

Olga Anaskina, Camino, Oil on canvas

It's this kind of spatial ambiguity that also asks for a slower viewing. Her subjects are not fixed, but forms appear to unfold slowly over time, inviting the viewer to return and look again. And in that way, they connect to this time of year in Costa Rica, where the atmosphere itself seems to shift by degree: light to shadow, dry to wet, known to uncertain.

Gesture and Process

Anaskina works quickly, creating brushwork that often pulls in multiple directions, cancelling or overriding previous marks. Some areas feel finished, others remain loose. This imbalance draws attention to the painterly process itself; you can see the layers of decision-making and hesitation.

Olga Anaskina, Empapada un Lugar que Habito, Oil on canvas

Many of Anaskina's landscape paintings show the weave of the canvas underneath the oil paint. Her washes fade into raw ground, lines end abruptly, and pigment appears to have dried unevenly. The works remain open, incomplete, and that incompletion becomes a kind of presence.

Seasonal Attention

To me, there’s something timely about returning to Olga Anaskina’s landscape paintings in July. Although not be documenting the seasons in any literal way, her work still feels aligned with them. Her approach seems to register the presence of nature indirectly, through doubt, repetition, and quiet persistence.

Born in Russia in 1979, Olga Anaskina trained in architecture before turning to painting full time. She moved to Costa Rica in 1991 shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has lived there ever since. Her work reflects a sustained attention to atmosphere, memory, and the quiet tempo of observation. Olga has exhibited extensively across Costa Rica, as well as in Russia, France and Argentina.

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Olga Anaskina's landscape paintings