Spaghetti Girl – White stoneware and iron oxide | 12” x 12” x 5”

Columbia native, Anastasia Chernoff, began working in radio and, for much of her life, has been an entrepreneur who has followed her passions as a commercial landscape designer, an interior designer, and as a floral designer when she owned her own retail floral operation for nine years.  Her creative design background served as a solid foundation when she began working as a professional artist after a soul awakening trip to Botswana and South Africa in 2005.  Completely self-taught, she sculpts in clay and other forms of mixed media with a Surrealist style and is fascinated more by the journey of the creative process than the outcome.  Once she’s finished a piece, she usually has very little attachment to it and is ready to move on to another art experience.  “The ability to mesh both my mind and hands gives me a sense of individuality, independence, and challenge.  I have few preconceptions about my work, and when I first started creating, thought that it was important that I did.  After driving myself a little crazy for a while, I decided it was okay to not know, which is one of the reasons I prefer not to discuss my work while it’s in progress. Inevitably, it’s going to change throughout the process and, if I’ve already labeled it, I can be thrown off with my process which can create frustration for me.” Through self hypnosis, she approaches her medium from a spontaneous and intuitive perspective in order to genuinely extract imagery and emotion from her life experiences. The human form consistently turns up in her emotional playground, which results in much of her work being figurative.   “I never know what will manifest itself, which creates a surprising, sometimes humorous, and always enlightening outcome.”

In addition to sculpting, Anastasia organizes and curates monthly art exhibitions at her gallery, Anastasia & Friends, on Main Street.  Her work can be seen at Anastasia & Friends gallery in the front of the Free Times’ building at 1534 Main Street, in the lobby of The Sheraton Hotel at 1400 Main Street, and at Motor Supply Company Bistro at 920 Gervais Street in Columbia, South Carolina.  She is in the process of creating a new web site.  In the interim, you can view more of her work on her Facebook page at Anastasia Chernoff, Sculpture & Mixed Media.