Daniela Raytchev

Raytchev’s talent started developing whilst at school. By sixteen she was an accomplished figurative artist already understanding the human form and the use of shade and light. She was highly proficient in both charcoal, pencil and ink and beginning to experiment with paint. 

Having completed her A Level studies Raytchev went on to Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design and later to London College of Fashion to study fashion design. Still using her figurative drawing, she started leaning more and more to the freedom of all art mediums rather than being constrained to one facet of it. She started experimenting with different mediums mixing them with paint and textiles creating more abstract images and collages. 

Whilst Raytchev was investigating and defining where she was taking her art, she went and lived in South Africa for one year, where her painting really began to evolve. On her return to the UK she had her first experience with living, recovered from her eating disorder, which motivated her first body of work exploring different levels of the human mind and how it affects emotional strength and behaviour. Raytchev used a limited palate in her first body of work, using only primary colours and shades of primary colours. She had first gallery solo show in 2015 at Debut Contemporary in London’s Notting Hill. 

As well as painting Raytchev started to bring sculpture into her bodies of work and created several art chess sets. These were extremely powerful and expressed in totality how broken yet strong the human mind can be as well as communicating a sense of hope for the future as shown in the image below. This piece has been recently on loan at the World Chess Hall of Fame museum in St. Louis.