Bored Panda reached out to Olga to learn more about her and her work. First of all, she introduced herself: “My name is Olga Vishnevskaya, I am 30 years old, I was born in the city of Kovrov, it is a small city with many military industries three hours from Moscow, but now I live in Tbilisi, Georgia. I have been drawing and painting since 2017 when Pepelangelo was born as a project and a phenomenon.”
Olga’s artwork featuring Pepe the Frog incorporated into iconic masterpieces is truly eye-catching. We were wondering what inspired Olga to merge a popular internet meme with classic art, and how she came up with the idea. She shared: “It's a very long story. In 2017, I had no job and lived in a terrible apartment on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, now I understand that I was in a deep depression. I decided to take drawing lessons from a teacher friend of mine so that I would have at least some reason to leave the house. At first, my drawings were terrible and I failed everything I did, I often cried during the lessons. Then we decided to start working with color - I made watercolor still lifes from life. It became more fun.
For my birthday, my grandmother sent me a present - two of her old canvases. One was with Jesus and the other had a vase of irises. My grandmother is not an artist and she did not feel sorry for her work. She suggested to overpaint it with something.
I know that since ancient times, artists learn by copying the Old Masters, copying classical art. I decided to copy the portrait of Philip II by Anthonis Mor. But drawing a human head is very difficult - it consists of many shapes, in addition, every day we see humans' faces and even the slightest mistake in the drawing becomes visible - the portrait becomes ugly or frightening. Therefore, I decided to draw not a human head, but a frog's head. After all, Pepe was originally a 2D character and his head design is quite primitive. It seemed to me to embody this head in volume and make it more realistic is a good task for such an aspiring artist like me.
So I copied the costume but added Pepe's head. I did not plan to make money from this, for me it was an exercise in developing the skills of a draftsman and painter. The portrait came out very funny and I decided to make a few - to give to my friends for the New Year, because I had almost no work and money.”
Olga continued: “In my youth, I was a regular visitor to anonymous imageboards, and there I saw some Pepe memes. In the Russian-speaking segment of the internet, he has always been a symbol of loneliness, melancholy and bright sadness, he has never had a political context. Of course, I had a folder on my desktop with my favorite Pepes. Later, Pepe became for me a set of geometric shapes - here is light, and here is shadow. Here is yellow and here is green. And now his head is turned and the light falls in a different place ... Pepe has become my artist's training equipment. At some point, I was terribly tired of green paint, people only wanted Pepe paintings from me. It seemed to me that I was trapped, that I was a prisoner of Pepe. Now Pepe for me is a whole layer of culture and a huge community. In such a short time, Pepe's existence has become such a complex cultural phenomenon that it can no longer be explained in a small text. I'm glad to be a small part of this story.
Pepelangelo is my full-time job. Painting itself is not 100 percent of my time - there is also communication with customers, maintaining social networks, purchasing materials, searching for references, taking photos and videos. I also opened a bar in St. Petersburg, but now I don’t manage it, my friend does it for me. It does not bring money, only expenses.”
Olga’s reinterpretation of classic art with Pepe adds a humorous and satirical dimension. We asked Olga what messages or emotions she aims to convey through these juxtapositions.
“I love the idea that a fascination with memes and characters from a certain underground internet culture can become art if you put the time, effort and skill into it. I believe that art is hard work, hours of effort and 90% craft and not a talent given by nature. I enjoy the idea that my art helps people show their hobbies to family and guests - showing art on the wall is much cooler than a picture on a smartphone. We spend a lot of time online and memes have become an integral part of our lives, they evoke a lot of emotions in us, this is modern culture. My painting helps make this hobby more real to the physical world, because we still live in the physical world. :) In short, I just like to prove with my paintings that our feelings about memes are serious, they matter,” shared Olga.
We were also curious to know what are the biggest challenges that Olga faces in her creative process. She wrote: “It’s still hard for me to believe that I’m an artist, sometimes it seems to me that I’m deceiving people, but in fact I’m not an artist, I just create images with colored spots. It's hard for me to think about being an artist and try to take it seriously - have plans, think of it as a career. I also get upset when I see 'art' that someone created in an evening without trying very hard being sold at a high price. I would also like to find time for professional art education. I think I'll be a very bad student, but that's no reason not to try.”
And lastly, Olga added: “It seems cool to me that you can spend tens of hours and thousands of dollars on a comic frog. This makes us believe that human thought and hard work can make any seemingly insignificant thing interesting, beautiful and deep. There is a lot of fast in the modern world - fast fashion, fast food, fast art. It's hard to enjoy this. I believe that to enjoy something you have to know a lot about the thing you enjoy and spend a lot of time.I would really like to try myself not only in painting, but also in sculpture and design. I plan to finish a few large paintings and stop taking commissions to focus on new directions. I would also like to work on a personal exhibition. I have so many ideas and plans, I will be happy even if I manage to realize half of them.”
