With each of her subjects, when painting portraits of contemporaries, the artist enters into a state of dialogue, seeking to know the soul of the person before beginning the work itself. Like in the Middle Ages, her portraits are filled with emblems and symbols that express the character and the achievements of the sitter.

Chuvasheva’s exhibitions in Russia are held almost exclusively in museum spaces — a sign of both the respect and recognition she receives from the museum community, and of her own special sensitivity to light and the environment surrounding her works. In dialogue with artworks of different eras, her portraits inhabit their own natural and harmonious setting.

Those who have seen Chuvasheva’s works only in reproduction are often astonished when they encounter the originals. The compositions, proportions, and precision of detail create an impression of monumentality, as if the works were large in scale — yet most of them, “measured in the palm of your hand,” are only slightly bigger than an adult’s hand. In the Middle Ages, Russian artists painted icons of a similar size for domestic devotion, so that a person could speak with each image modestly and on equal terms, without being overwhelmed by grandeur or beauty.

Tatyana met her future husband while still a student at the Lyceum, and they have been together ever since. In the family of artists Andrey and Tatyana, seven children have grown up. Chuvasheva does not paint children as charming dolls; rather, she reveals in them the depth of an inner presence — that dimension of human existence which has no age, yet manifests itself through character and the faint traces of a child’s own choice of the future.

Children in Chuvasheva’s paintings look at us as if from eternity — beautiful and distant, young gentlemen and ladies, scholars and coquettes, boys with the eyes of deer and girls in headscarves. They seem to have gathered for a carnival, or to have emerged from the darkness of the paintings like reflections of the past in antique mirrors.

At the time of transition from Old Russian culture to the modern era, a new type of portrait emerged in Russia — the parsuna — neither an icon nor a lifelike painting. Unlike in other Eastern European cultures, the Russian parsuna was not merely an insert, but a form of remembrance. Chuvasheva’s portraits of children draw on this tradition of parsuna painting — works that preserved the faces of loved ones forever.