Meet Kseniia Derr: the Artist Behind Art and Rugs

Every rug and painting that leaves Art and Rugs is drawn and made by one person. Before a single design reaches the tufting frame, it has passed through hands that have painted cars, forged steel, set stones, gilded metal and covered walls with murals. Kseniia Derr has spent more than eighteen years working across fine art, craft and applied design. Hand tufting is where those disciplines now meet.

Drawing, craft and making

As a child, Kseniia was always drawing, modelling or making something. She went on to spend nine years at the Stieglitz Academy of Art and Design in Saint Petersburg: three at its lyceum and six at the university. During that period, she painted, exhibited and sold her work while training across several applied arts.

Metal, from forging to jewellery

At the academy Kseniia immersed herself in architectural and decorative metal: classical techniques and ancient works alongside modern approaches. Her training included repoussé and chasing in copper and brass, forging with Damascus and Bulat steel, and jewellery work where metal met inlaid stones, enamel, patina, galvanics, gilding and silvering. She made dishes and objects, painted walls and decor, and learned that material is never an obstacle, only a question.

Eight years of painting cars

Andy Warhol’s painted cars led her towards custom automotive finishes. For eight years she ran a studio working on classic and modern cars, using deep Candy colours, chameleons, airbrushing, pinstriping. The project she is proudest of is a BMW 8 Series done in the style of Andy Warhol, with a colour palette drawn from Impressionist masterpieces in the Hermitage. Ordinary repainting never interested her: there is less art in that.

Walls, interiors and murals

Alongside the cars came design and decorative projects: murals for interiors and for building facades, painted in techniques from graffiti to grisaille; exclusive painting of interior items and fittings: lamps, radiators, hoods, with multi-layered coatings, imitations of aged and patinated metal, and colours matched precisely to a room’s textiles and furniture where the mass market had nothing to offer.

Painting, always

Through all of it she kept painting canvases, in the styles she has always leaned towards: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Pop Art. She works in painting and graphics alike, experiments with colours, techniques, textures, formats and subjects, can paint in any technique including realism, and on request adds elements like gold leaf. She is interested in colour that carries emotion and in paintings that hold attention beyond their first decorative effect.

Why rugs, and why now

Hand tufting brings the earlier disciplines together. The academy drawing shows in the pencil sketches every commission starts from; the Photoshop and Illustrator skills from years of design work turn those sketches into exact vector mockups, with every animal detail drawn by hand and no AI filter; the car-painter’s eye for colour picks the yarn palette; the metalworker’s patience carries a piece through days at the frame; and the shears that finish each rug sculpt the pile the way a jeweller finishes a surface. The rugs themselves are tufted by hand in her studio in acrylic yarn, acrylic–wool blends and wool.

Today Kseniia is the artistic director and lead artisan of Art and Rugs. Every piece in the catalogue, from the rugs and textile wall art to the paintings, is hers from first sketch to final finish. You can read more about the studio and the whole team on the about page, see the process itself in how a hand-tufted rug is made, or bring her your own idea through the custom order page, where you can send a subject, photograph or set of dimensions for a commission.