Illustration has an intimacy that connects the viewer with the nostalgia of children’s books, satirical portraits, and the stylised representation of experience that makes a narrative of line, form and shade. Commercial illustration conveys an emotional tone that the nuanced complexity of photography sometimes reads differently.
The personal work of illustrator Sasha Khorosheva sees the artist framing her experience of Vancouver in a way that juxtaposes the softness of memory with layers of narrative storytelling. Her use of colour and line plays with the presentation of detail, and as an artist with a Russian background there is a connection to a long history of illustration as a less regulated format for artistic expression than fine art. A lineage that includes Ivan Bilibin and the Mir Iskusstva circle, for whom any conceptual separation between illustration and the conceits of painting was either ignored or flaunted (Golynets 1981).
Key pieces from Khorosheva are those which reflect on scenes of life in Canada. Stanely Park [sic] (2026) shows two women drawing and painting amongst verdant grass, while the trunk of a tree pierces upward through a hem of foliage. The watercolours gloss the dappled sunlight through trees, while red highlights join flowers, a hairclip, a pen, bits of bark and the sole of a running shoe. The use of colour joins the attention of the viewer and the personal vision of the artist: comforts and distractions, peace where elsewhere darker forces exist in contrast to the casual meditations of the subjects. Looking at the engrossed artists, the viewer is left to peer at them, drawn to details, but watching over their shoulders.
This raised, abstracted view of strangers recalls Edward Hopper, who made a career of the unguarded glimpse, most nakedly in Night Windows (1928), where the city itself seems to grant the painter permission to watch (Levin 1980). Khorosheva works in daylight and without Hopper’s frigidity, yet she occupies his position: inside the scene geographically, outside it socially. Baudelaire framed his ‘passionate spectator’ as one who moves through the crowd without dissolving into it (Baudelaire 1964). Her titles suggest position. Stanely Park and W 15th Ave Vancouver are addresses, carrying the notation of a Google map, as though set down by someone finding their way around a new city. Even the misspelling belongs here, a place learned by ear before it was learned in print. Locals grow so accustomed to where they live they rarely attach addresses to their memories of a scene.
In W 15th Ave Vancouver (2026) the viewer looks down on someone arriving from a journey. Are they coming home? Have they rented a room? The traveller appears to wear headphones, oblivious to their surroundings. It is a bright sunlit scene, yet the angle down at them, and the muted waiting of the subject, increase a sense of voyeurism. The sense recedes into fantasy with her two later untitled works (referred to here as Lighthouse and Witch). Lighthouse (2026) shows a strange red light coming from the tower. The scene appears to be daytime, suggesting the imagined emanations of the building. It is a wistful, tranquil imagining, emphasising the sort of view that travellers might be drawn to. Is the view from the same traveller as before?
With Witch (2026) comes another littoral scene where puffy pink clouds frame the mouthlike tumble of a cliff, where traces of volcanic rock pierce upwards, a juxtaposition of soft and sharp framing the tension from which a small broomstick-riding figure hangs. It is a Miyazaki sort of scene, with the élan and light flow that prefigure some oncoming drama. But is the drama really there?
When speaking about her work, Khorosheva says she wants people to discover unexpected beautiful moments within the everyday, just as she does when sketching from the world she finds, and for viewers to feel familiarity and home in places they have never been (Khorosheva 2026). She graduated from the Vancouver Film School in 2019, followed by Centennial College in 2022, and one imagines that her practice is guided by the cinematic. Her personal work sits alongside her professional work on Lana Longbeard (2024), streaming on CBC Gem and Cartoon Network UK (Milligan 2023), allowing a perspective where the artist pursues a sense of place, emotion, and poise. Yet the pictures argue something not quite aligned with her stated aim. An émigré from Russia, Khorosheva sketches a belonging she is still in the act of acquiring, and what the work discloses, knowingly or not, is the searching itself. The warmth is real, but it is the warmth of a lit window seen from the pavement. There are mysteries in her work, and her otherness is there, peering at people and scenes, one step removed, but present in the idolising, the imaginary, and the ever-hopeful.
The challenge with illustration is that it frames the viewer and the emotion within codified lines and narrative pathways: safety rails that art more often than not discards to serve the mystery of its siren song. Khorosheva’s work has that pull. Through the simplicity of her scenes, a deeper melancholy and detachment is revealed. Her practice, masterful, playful and professional, teases at a formal tension by suggesting the unexpected, and in that space, against the promise of harmony, art resides.
Bibliography
Baudelaire, C 1964, The painter of modern life and other essays, trans. J Mayne, Phaidon, London.
Golynets, S 1981, Ivan Bilibin, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad.
Levin, G 1980, Edward Hopper: the art and the artist, WW Norton, New York.
Milligan, M 2023, ‘Lana Longbeard sets sail for international airwaves’, Animation Magazine, 15 June.
Images courtesy of the artist © Sasha Khorosheva. This article is part of a supported series by emerging artists including Sasha Khorosheva. All unattributed photography by Sasha Khorosheva.
Ex-London based reader of art and culture. LSE Masters Graduate. Arts and Culture writer since 1995 for Future Publishing, Conde Nast, Wig Magazine and Oyster. Specialist subjects include; media, philosophy, cultural aesthetics, contemporary art and French wine. When not searching for road-worn copies of eighteenth-century travelogues he can be found loitering in the inspirational uplands of art galleries throughout Europe.
