Meet Ksenia Derr: the Artist Behind Art and Rugs

Every piece that carries the Art and Rugs name is drawn by hand before it is made. By the time a design reaches the frame it has already gone through hands that sprayed cars for a living, worked hot steel, set stones, laid gold onto metal and put murals across the sides of buildings. Ksenia Derr, sometimes transliterated Kseniia, has been at this for over eighteen years, moving between fine art, hand craft and applied design. Tufting is where all of it finally converges.

A kid who could not stop making things

She was drawing, modeling and building something for as long as anyone can remember. That turned into nine years inside the Stieglitz Academy of Art and Design in Saint Petersburg: three in its lyceum, then six more at the university. She was painting, showing and selling work the entire time, while training across a stack of applied disciplines at once.

From the forge to the jewelry bench

Metal took up much of the academy years: architectural and decorative work, classical technique studied next to ancient objects and next to contemporary approaches. She learned repoussé and chasing in copper and brass, forging in Damascus and Bulat steel, and bench jewelry, where metal meets set stones, enamel, patina, galvanics, gilding and silvering. She turned out vessels and objects, painted walls and decor, and came away certain that material is never an obstacle, only a question to answer. That whole side of her practice, museum restoration through art metalwork and academic painting, sits in her own atelier portfolio at kseniaderr.com.

Eight years spraying cars

Warhol’s painted cars pointed her toward custom automotive finishes. She ran that studio for eight years, working on classics and on modern metal, deep Candy colors, chameleons, airbrush, pinstriping. The one she is proudest of is a BMW 8 Series done in Warhol’s idiom, its palette pulled from Impressionist masterpieces in the Hermitage. Straight repaint jobs never held her interest. There is not enough art in them.

Walls, interiors, facades

Design and decorative commissions ran alongside the cars: murals inside rooms and across building facades, in everything from graffiti technique to grisaille. She painted interior fittings one at a time, lamps, radiators, hoods, in multi-layered coatings, in imitations of aged and patinated metal, and in shades matched precisely to the textiles and furniture already in a room, in situations where nothing on the mass market came close.

Painting never stopped

Canvases kept coming through all of it, in the directions she has always been pulled toward: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Pop Art. She works in painting and in graphics, experiments with color, technique, texture, format and subject, can execute in any manner including strict realism, and will add gold leaf when a client asks. What holds her attention is color that carries feeling, and pictures that keep working on you after the first decorative hit wears off.

So why yarn

Tufting collects the earlier trades in one place. Academy drawing shows up in the pencil study every commission opens with. Years of design work in Photoshop and Illustrator turn those studies into exact vector mockups, every animal detail drawn by a person, no AI filter involved. The car painter’s eye picks the yarn palette. The metalworker’s patience carries a piece through days at the frame. And the shears that finish each surface sculpt pile the way a jeweler finishes a face of metal. The pieces themselves are tufted by hand in her studio, in acrylic, acrylic-wool blends and wool.

Ksenia is artistic director and lead artisan of Art and Rugs today. Everything in the catalog, rugs and textile wall art as well as the paintings, is hers from opening sketch through final finish. There is more on the studio and the rest of the team on the about page, the making itself is laid out in how a hand-tufted rug is made, and your own idea reaches her through the custom order page, where a subject, a photograph or a set of dimensions is all it takes to start.