Resilience, Identity, Transformation:
The Art of Canan Altinkas
Canan Altinkas, PhD, is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and therapeutic art life coach based in Ontario, Canada. With over 15 years of international experience in fine arts education and community engagement, she brings a deeply reflective and inclusive approach to her creative practice. Holding a doctorate in Fine Arts Education from Turkey’s Dokuz Eylül University, Altinkas has taught at universities in Turkey and Cyprus, curated exhibitions such as “Hope Survived” at Queen’s University, and currently instructs art classes at different institutions in Kitchener, Ont.
Her work explores resilience, identity, and transformation through a variety of media, often combining artistic expression with therapeutic and social aims. As a former Artist Protection Fund Fellow and an active member of several arts advisory committees in Kitchener, Altinkas continues to champion the role of art in healing, advocacy, and cultural dialogue.
Dynamism and ‘Maximum Emotionality’
Nataliia Kononova
Nataliia Kononova is a Ukrainian journalist from Donbas. By 1998, she became a correspondent for the first major private national newspaper, Kievskie vedomosti. While reporting about the mining region of Luhansk and Donetsk, she often wrote about artists, inventors, sculptors, writers, civil servants, and politicians.
When war began in Ukraine in 2014, she and her husband moved temporarily to Ivano-Frankivsk, where her husband continued his work as a professor and researcher. Here, while continuing to work as a journalist, she also took up working in ceramics. In doing so, she accidentally found her own style of creating paintings by layering fabrics.
The main principle that informs her work is “to achieve the ‘dynamism’ of an image for the sake of maximum emotionality.” In 2018, the Ivano-Frankivsk gallery Bastion hosted her first exhibition of fabric paintings. Seven years after the start of the war, she and her husband returned to Donbas, but four months later, the war destroyed their new home as well as Nataliia’s collection of paintings and ceramics.
The Carleton University chapter of the international organization Scholars at Risk gave her husband the opportunity to continue pursuing his academic work in Ottawa and Nataliia the opportunity to paint again. Nataliia says: “A person is like a vessel from which flows that which has filled it. We live in Ottawa near the Hog’s Back waterfall, which is different and unexpected every day of the year. Thousands of years can be seen through its fast waters. In its expansive flows, I see human faces, the contours of marvelous animals and fantastic creatures.”
