Discover Vita Zilinskiene

Vita Zilinskiene is a Lithuanian-born artist based in the UK. She was born on New Year’s Day in 1993 in Merkinė, Lithuania, into a family of six children. She grew up in a creative, working-class household shaped by craft, care, and physical labour. Her mother worked in an art factory and holds a degree in industrial weaving, her father was a firefighter, and later both parents became farmers. These environments—making, protecting, tending land—continue to inform her sensitivity to material, rhythm, and endurance.

Vita studied Fine Art and Fortepiano at Jadvyga Čiurlionytė Art School and completed her secondary education at Vincas Krėvė Gymnasium. After school, she stepped away from formal education, travelling and working in the UK and Crete while continuing her creative self-discovery. During this time, she returned to painting through experimentation with acrylics and developed her practice as a songwriter and performer.

She graduated with First-Class Honours in BA (Hons) Popular Music Performance from Solent University, Southampton, in 2018. Although she initially worked as a singer-songwriter, her practice gradually shifted toward visual art while supporting people with disabilities and dementia—experiences that reshaped her understanding of care, presence, and human connection.

During this period, Vita was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition that led to a thyroidectomy in 2021. Living with lasting health challenges prompted a deeper attentiveness to the body and change, and a decisive return to painting as her primary medium.

In 2022, she completed an MA in Visual Communication at Solent University with Distinction. Her postgraduate work explored illustration, animation, and painting as narrative and sensory languages, ultimately consolidating oil painting at the centre of her practice.

Today, Vita works through an interdisciplinary approach shaped by music, painting, lived experience, and embodied labour. Her work explores adaptation, connection, and resilience through fluid, responsive mark-making. Painting functions as a way of listening—allowing movement, uncertainty, and time to remain visible on the surface.

Vita’s painting style combines expressive realism with a contemporary, process-led approach. Working primarily in oil, she emphasises authentic mark-making, texture, and layered surfaces. Colour and gesture are guided intuitively, shaped by rhythm and repetition rather than strict representation. Her work holds movement and instability as active elements, allowing the physicality of paint and the passage of time to remain visible.

Vita offers original, hand-painted works released regularly throughout the year. While timing may vary, each piece is a unique, unreproduced artwork created with close attention to process and material.

Collectors are invited to follow the work as it develops over time, with updates shared via the website and newsletter.