About
Nata Mo
Nata Mo is the working name of Nataliia Moiseienko, a Ukrainian-born painter who has been exhibiting since the mid-1990s and now lives and works on the East Anglian coast.
She trained the long way round — art school, fine-art college, then the Mykhailo Boichuk Kyiv State Academy of Decorative Applied Arts and Design and the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine — before spending part of the early 2000s living, studying and working in Paris, at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. It shows. There is a classical European discipline under even her loosest work: the drawing is sound, the colour is considered, and the composition always knows where it is going, even when the brush appears not to.
For most of her career that discipline was put to work in Kyiv, where she built a substantial reputation, exhibited widely and received official recognition from the Mayor of Kyiv. Her paintings have been shown in more than thirty exhibitions across Ukraine, France, Italy and the UK, and are held in several hundred private collections in the UK, the USA, Canada, France, Australia and Ukraine.
In May 2022, displaced from her home on the outskirts of Kyiv, she came to England — and to a stretch of coast whose light, weather and architecture have since taken over her work. It began, practically, with watercolour: it was what she could carry and afford. The resulting portraits of harbours, pubs, terraces and lighthouses — crisp ink, bright washes, a deliberate and rather lovable wonkiness — found an audience almost immediately, at markets, at festivals and online.
Alongside them, the heavier work has returned. Her mixed-media landscapes use acrylic, oil, crackle glazes and structural pastes to build surfaces that look weathered rather than painted: marsh, tide and dune, rendered as much by texture as by colour. A series of larger, more conceptual canvases is in progress. If the watercolours are the coast on a good day, these are the coast in February — and all the better for it.
Trained
Kyiv State Academy of Decorative Applied Arts and Design · National Academy of Arts of Ukraine · Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
Exhibited
30+ exhibitions in Ukraine, France, Italy and the United Kingdom since 1995
Collected
Several hundred private collections in the UK, USA, Canada, France, Australia and Ukraine
Works in
Watercolour, ink, oil, acrylic, pastel and mixed media — from impressionism and realism to abstraction
One eye, endless canvas
Some painters talk about learning to see. Nata Mo has had to learn it twice.
A cancer of the right optic nerve has left her with permanent loss of sight in that eye. Thanks to the specialists at the James Paget University Hospital and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, the condition is stable and the other eye is healthy. She now paints with one — and paints with a concentration that anyone who has watched her work will recognise. Light, shadow and colour are not things she takes for granted, and it shows on every sheet.
