Born in Ukraine, Vlasta Smola has always been involved in the arts in one form or another. During childhood, she attended rigorous daily training in gymnastics, including choreography and dance, which exposed her to uncompromising standards of excellence. After moving to the United States to receive a MA in Marketing Communications, she had a brief corporate career in advertising. Today Smola applies the same rigor learned in her early gymnastics training to her painting practice; her impossibly-detailed creations are brought to life with hair-thin brushes and translucent glazes of acrylic paint. Though it may be difficult to imagine, aside from graphic design training and basic figure drawing, Smola’s artisitic skills are largely self-taught, and have been arrived at primarily through trial and error. Deeply influenced by painters of the Renaissance, she has devoted herself to capturing the same voluptuous color and rich detailed surfaces, using them to create beautiful scenes that evoke a modern mythology and mysterious worlds where the impossible becomes possible. Smola's abiding love of beauty and her Renaissance aspirations fuse with contemporary sensibilities as she depicts flesh, feathers, and fabric in sumptuous detail.