Biography | Diana Baiss

Diana Baiss was born on April 26th 1990 in a small town called Arkalyk in the north of Kazakhstan. She is the only child in a family of a pediatrician and a metallurgist at a lead manufacturing plant. Her craving for drawing began to manifest itself from an early age, alas, this desire was not satisfied by attending ordinary art classes. At the age of 7, after her parents’ divorce, she moved to Almaty to live with her grandfather, a former sailor of the Baltic Fleet, who was mainly involved in the upbringing of the future artist. Studying at the local Secondary School № 97 was easy, Diana attended school regularly, but with a great aversion, the only thing she liked were Russian Literature, History and Geography.

At the age of 16, she got her first job as a linesman (line judge) at tennis tournaments organized by the Kazakhstan Tennis Federation, where she continued to work for 5 years while studying. During this time, still without realizing her vocation in art, she entered Turan University for a Bachelor of Science degree in Hospitality Business Management, a choice made on impulse and completely unconsciously. Despite her good academic performance, Diana was very selective in the subjects she was forced to study, preferring to read on the sly the works of existentialists during lectures on Toponymy and Cartography.

After graduating from her bachelor's degree in 2012, without any enthusiasm, she received a grant to study for a Master’s of Science degree in Hospitality and Entrepreneurship in Tourism at Turan University, which she later regarded as a manifestation of escapism. Over the next few years, a passion for photography emerged along with her painting.

With creativity remaining in the background, attempts to work in an office and “be like everyone else” came to the fore. Despite her efforts, Diana felt more and more like a foreign body, which is constantly rejected and completely disgusted with everything related to an office environment.

Just a year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Diana Baiss quit her last job, and deliberately doomed herself to social death and seclusion in order to come to grips with her creative practice and self-education. Until 2021 all of Diana’s art were created without any hope of presenting them to the general public in the foreseeable future due to high self-criticism and self-doubt, and her creative path was periodically interrupted by the desire to quit everything and give up. Presently, Diana Baiss believes that creativity justifies her existence and helps her come to terms with the modern realities of life. She states the following about her art and creative approach.

“As a self-taught artist, the main motive of my work has always been and still is a paradoxical desire to curb chaos or destroy any order trying to catch some balance. The birth of new things occurs only thanks to chaos, but any "innovations" cannot materialize without the participation of order and discipline, as if, on one side of the scale there is a wild beast, and on the other a wise old man, one cannot refuse one or the other, but one can try to reconcile them in one creative flow. We live in an era when the possibilities for human creativity are endless, so I don't get attached to a certain style and don't drive myself into artificial frames. If you put all my artworks in one room, you will get the feeling that they were created by different people, I call this "the effect of creative splitting." My art broadcasts the state of anxiety and hope in which the modern world lives. A life full of frames, restrictions and standards, where a person is often constrained, covered with a thick shell of his own fears, doubts and laziness, a categorical "but" and "if". At the same time, creativity grants freedom of thought, is able to provide simple answers to the most complex questions of being, predetermining the universality of aspirations and hopes of millions of people around the world. When I create my artwork I do everything spontaneously and ‘in one breath’, fully involved in the process.

My intuition is my inner beast, the only thing I listen to. I am inspired by struggle and contrast - the eternal sources of chaos. Chaos, without which there would be no life, no art”.