Art Exhibitions & Events

Surreal life path

Mariya Myronova is a surrealist artist based in Cambridge, UK, with Ukrainian heritage rooted in Berdyansk, a small seaside town on the shores of the Azov Sea. Her artistic journey began long before formal education—before she could speak, she was already drawing. With two busy parents, she found creative outlets wherever she could: on her father’s toenails under the table, on school desks, and nearly every surface within reach. It wasn’t rebellion—it was instinct.

She went on to attend art school for four years, followed by an additional year of focused artistic study and regular lessons at a local artist’s studio. But when the time came to choose a profession, she was told that the fumes from oil paints were unhealthy and that art was “not a career for a woman.” The dream was halted. Determined to find another path with purpose, she asked to study law and become a defence lawyer, but that, too, was denied—this time because the family couldn’t afford it.

Instead, she was sent to university to study languages. There, her fascination with meaning took on a new form. In her final year, she won a national award for her exploration of the etymology of ethical concepts such as “good, ” “evil, ” and “happiness”—early proof that her surrealist lens was already developing, even through language.

While working on a PhD in linguistics in Kyiv, Mariya’s doodling habits turned into something more. Her drawings helped her land a job in graphic design—despite having no formal computer training at the time. Visual thinking became her greatest asset. After 20 years in the creative industry in Ukraine and the UK, the constraints of sticking to commercial briefs—and the pause brought by COVID—pushed her to finally make the decision to pursue life as a full-time artist.

Today, Mariya paints in the language she was born to speak: surrealism. Her work is a visual algorithm—an attempt to decode the complexity of modern life, society, and the human mind. She continues to ask the same questions she did as a student, but now she answers them through oil, metaphor, and symbol.

Parallel universe

Alongside her active work as a painter and exhibiting artist, Myronova also runs a teaching studio in Cambridge, where she currently leads four groups of students across different age ranges. She shares her creative energy and deep knowledge of art history, offering her students exposure to a wide variety of styles, techniques, and media.

Her classes focus on developing imagination, visual literacy, and critical thinking through exploration of great artworks, hands-on experimentation, and sketching both outdoors and in museums. She is attentive and encouraging—helping her students take their ideas further and guiding them in developing serious, meaningful work. She gives them tools for life: how to trust their intuition, train their eye, and draw from the best examples in art history.