Dasha Bough spent some of her earliest childhood in Russia before her family returned to her native Montana when she was 5 years old. A budding appreciation for fine art would send her back to St. Petersburg over several summers to take classes in oil painting and drawing at the Repin Academy of Arts.
“I love portraiture. Once I learned to draw a face, I never stopped. I butcher landscapes, but faces I love because I can pair them with narrative,” said the freshman, who lives in Weld Hall.
But then came a 2009 episode of “Ukraine’s Got Talent” featuring artist Kseniya Simonova, and Bough found herself inspired to try sand art.
“I am trying to push the techniques of an art form that’s still not widely explored,” said Bough, who works with a lightbox her grandfather built for her. “I love the idea of playing with negative space, and in sand art there are so many opportunities for storytelling. It’s hard to find an artistic medium that is at once distilled and sequential. In a sense, it combines drawing and fine art with narrative and animation in a way that quite literally reveals the artist’s hand as a character.”