I’m Ethel Voronkova, a Filipino-Canadian artist based in Ontario, Canada.

I create abstract paintings that explore the landscapes we carry within ourselves — the places shaped by memory, emotion, time, change, and the experiences that stay with us long after a moment has passed.

I’ve always been drawn to the feeling a place can leave behind rather than simply what it looks like. My paintings begin there: with a feeling, a memory, a shift in perspective, or sometimes something I can’t quite put into words.

I don’t paint places you can visit. I paint the places we experience internally.

My Process

My work is intuitive and largely created without photographic reference. I begin on raw canvas, building loose underpaintings and allowing thin layers of acrylic to soak, move, pool, and drift across the surface.

I’m interested in what happens when I stop trying to control the painting completely.

Some layers disappear. Others remain underneath, revealing themselves slowly. Fluid lines move through the work like traces of thought or memory. What emerges is often unexpected, a sense of distance, atmosphere, movement, or stillness.

The process mirrors something I find true about life, that we are continually shaped by what happens to us, what we hold onto, what we release, and what we become.

The Landscapes Within

My paintings often resemble mountains, water, skies, and distant horizons, but they aren't intended to represent specific places.

Mountains can become a feeling of resilience, perspective, or standing still long enough to see things differently.

Water can become release , an exhale, a surrender, a reminder that not everything needs to be held onto.

Light, atmosphere and space, allow the work to remain open to interpretation. I want people to be able to find something of their own experience within it.

For me, that is one of the most meaningful parts of making art.

A painting begins as something deeply personal, but once it leaves the studio, it becomes part of someone else's story.

A Life in Art

I began my full-time art career in 2017 after studying Fine Art at Centennial College.

Since then, my work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, including exhibitions at Arta Gallery, Hamilton City Hall, the Orillia Museum of Art and History, Art Gallery of Hamilton Art and Sales Services, Vallee Art Contemporain in Montreal, Paula White Gallery in Kitchener Ontario and Hambleton Gallery in Kelowna, British Columbia.

My work is also held in private and corporate collections across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

My practice continues to evolve through ongoing bodies of work that explore different aspects of our inner lives like the passing moods of a single day to the quieter, more complicated process of becoming.

Beyond the Painting

I believe art should have a life beyond the studio.

Alongside my original paintings, I create carefully produced limited-edition prints so that the work can live in more spaces and become part of more people's everyday lives.

Whether an original painting becomes the center of a room, a limited-edition work finds its place in a home, or a piece becomes part of a thoughtfully designed space, I care about how the work is lived with.

I want my paintings to create a feeling — something you notice in passing, return to over time, and perhaps see differently as you do.

Because we change.

And sometimes, the art around us can change with us.

Thank you for being here.

My hope is that when you spend time with my work, you find something that feels familiar, like a quiet memory, a moment of stillness and a sense of movement.

Or perhaps simply a feeling you didn't have a name for until you saw it.

Thank you for letting my work become part of your space and, in some small way, part of your story.

— Ethel