Agita Janusevska

I’m Latvian-born and have been living in Edinburgh, Scotland, for more than 15 years. I work mainly with painting, drawing and mixed media, although my creative work has also extended into wearable art and murals.

I’ve loved drawing and making things since childhood. I actually wanted to go to art college when I was younger, but I talked myself out of it because I didn’t think I was good enough to be an artist. For several years art more or less disappeared from my life.

It came back when I began studying Interior Design in 2007. Drawing, painting and other creative work were part of the course, and I realised again how much I enjoyed creating. At the same time, I struggled with the academic approach to art and with being told how something was supposed to be done. I enjoyed creating, but I needed the freedom to discover my own way of doing it.

The biggest change came during the first Covid lockdown in 2020. I picked up my watercolours and started creating again. For about four months I drew almost every day — flowers, figures, abstract forms, whatever I felt like making. There was no particular plan behind it. I was simply enjoying the process.

During the second lockdown, faces started appearing in my work. I had never really drawn faces and my first reaction was that I didn’t know how to do it, but I decided to try anyway. Those first faces were very instinctive and abstract, often drawn in ink.

At the time I didn’t really understand why I kept returning to people and faces. That understanding came much later. My work often appears to be about people - their inner states, emotions, identities and the masks we wear, but I gradually realised that, in some way, it has always been about me too. My own emotions, experiences and subconscious find their way into the work, sometimes before I consciously understand what I am expressing.

My process is still very intuitive. Sometimes I begin with an idea or an image that inspires me, but I rarely know exactly what the finished piece will look like. I often choose colours simply because they feel right rather than because they are supposed to be there. I change things as I work, follow what is happening in front of me, and I usually know a piece is finished when I step back and no longer feel that I want to change anything.

Imperfection is important to me. I’m not particularly interested in things that are too perfect or polished because, for me, there is often less to discover in them. Life isn’t perfect, people certainly aren’t perfect, and nothing in nature really is either. I find imperfect things much more interesting, honest and alive.

I also don’t want to tell people what they are supposed to see or feel when they look at my work. I would rather create curiosity and leave enough space for someone to find something that belongs to them. One person might see joy, another sadness, pain, humour or something completely different. What matters to them at that moment will influence what they find in the work.

My practice is changing again at the moment. After completing a series of nine large-scale works, I started thinking about combining different styles and approaches. That led me back to something I had wanted to explore for a long time — creating faces with more structure, volume, light and shadow rather than keeping them completely abstract.

For a long time I assumed I couldn’t really do that, which is probably exactly why I eventually wanted to try. I’m now learning and experimenting with this new direction, combining it with the freedom and intuition that have always been part of my work. What began as an experiment feels increasingly like the beginning of a new stage in my practice. I genuinely enjoy it and want to keep pushing it further.

I don’t feel a need to know exactly where my work will go next. Experimenting, learning something new and allowing the work to change are important parts of being an artist for me.

Selected Exhibitions & Art Fairs

April 2024 — Castle Mills: Then & Now | Whose Gallery is it Anyway?, group exhibition, Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh
September 2024 — Vision, ORION Art Collective group exhibition, Dundas Street Gallery, Edinburgh
July 2025 — Kaleidoscope, ORION Art Collective group exhibition, Patriothall Gallery, Edinburgh
August 2025 — Aberdeen Art Fair
September 2025 — Edinburgh Art Fair
SaatchiArt : Agita Janusevska