Lyudmila Sikhosana

Having grown up in the Zaporisha Region, Tokmak, Ukraine, Lyudmila Sikhosana currently lives in Fen Ditton, Cambridge. Graduating in Art & Technical Drawing from Rostov-on-Don State Pedagogical University, she has gone on to practice and teach art in Ukraine, Russia, and most recently, the United Kingdom. She predominately works in the figurative and impressionistic style, mainly in oils on canvas or board and is inspired by the local landscape and the diverse people of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire.

 

Sikhosana works almost exclusively en plain air, meaning she works outside and within the landscape, capturing both the light and the mood of a distinctive place and time. She occasionally works from memory but, unusually in our digital age, never from photographs or other, secodary images. She has to work quickly and often returns to the same place to capture the magical hours of sunset, sunrise, early morning and afternoon light with both the experience and profound understanding of her subject.  

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​Sikhosana paints wherever and whenever she can from as close to home as her back garden to her favourite escapes across the Cambridgeshire countryside, working en plein air, where she captures the unexpected colours, the dramatic light and changing of seasons in a way that reflects the freshness, unexpected qualities and spontaneity of nature. Her work has been selected for exhibition at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy and the Mall Galleries in London as well as Wolfson College, University of Cambridge as an "invited professional artist" in the Kill or Cure exhibition  of 2022. ​

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“When I paint, I feel elated, in unison with the people and the space around me – I disappear into the landscape and the subject matter in front of me’, she explains. ‘For me creating a painting is not about making a faithful reproduction but rather about beautiful visual experience that is based in some fundamental truth in nature. It might reflect what is seen but I play with the paint on the canvas until something remarkable happens, which has its own internal truth.”

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Sikhosana was the winner of the Cambridgeshire Plein Air Artist of the Year Award  in 2025, which included judge Ben MacGregor (Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year winner 2025). Her work is held in private collections in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire and internationally.