Anastasia Yaney Bio

Anastasia Yaney has spent most of her life in the Dayton area, but she loves to travel and visit new places. While growing up, her family was always taking hikes, camping and traveling.  This is where she learned to appreciate nature and always marveled at its beauty. Consequently, most of her art is of nature and the outdoors including landscapes, flowers, structures and animals. She loves capturing the beauty she sees around her, freezing it in time. Not only nature, but the structures and people coexisting with nature. When looking at her art, you can see her passion.

Anastasia showed her creative and artistic abilities at a young age. As young as six years old she started drawing and painting. As she grew older and showed talent, her Mother taught her the basics including perspective, lighting and shading. When she was middle school age, she self-taught herself how to draw animals, her favorite was horses. In high school she focused more on her painting, experimenting with oil and acrylic paints. In addition, at the age of six she started entering her artwork into the Ohio State Fair and later into the Montgomery County Fair. She won over one hundred ribbons, with the majority being first, second and third place, over her childhood through high school. She also won numerous Grand Awards and Best of Show awards from the Ohio State Fair.

When Anastasia was around eight years old, she was introduced to photography by her father who loves this art form. This soon became a love of hers as well. She started with a simple automatic camera. By the time she was in high school, she had learned how to use a 35mm camera. In high school she got her first exposure to the work of a master photographer, Ansel Adams, who she greatly admires. He too shared her love of nature and wilderness. Her love of photography also enhanced her painting and drawing. This is when she started painting from photographs with acrylic paints. Photography gave her the ability to freeze a scene in time and allow her time to capture it on canvas. As time progressed she learned to take aspects from different photographs and combine them into one art piece.

During high school and college she worked with children in a few different jobs teaching them art. After Anastasia finished college, she worked as a portrait photographer for about 5 years and as a freelance photographer for about 10 years. She then gave up her full-time job to raise her children and remodel an one hundred year old home. Although she didn’t stop creating. Whenever she had a chance she would paint, draw or photograph what she saw as interesting. For the past few years she has participated in a couple of local galleries, TEJAS in Downtown Dayton and Xenia’s X*Act Coterel Gallery. Now that both her children have graduated from high school she plans to spend more time with her art.