Иоланта Талайкене was educated at the Lithuanian Academy of Fine Arts in Vilnius. At the time, the school was under Soviet control, and artists were expected to exist within a certain cramped framework. She felt stifled. “It was strange and unacceptable to me,” Talaikiene recalls of that time in her life. For years she repressed her creative instincts, but when she relocated to the United States, she felt an outpouring of all the accumulated but unexpressed work she had kept inside. She began painting, trusting her own instincts, and sharing a vision that has been uniquely gifted to her. A surrealist vein runs through Talaikiene’s work. Her palette is consistently cool and she likes to paint with what she calls "the colors of moonlight." Informed by the myths of myriad nations and ages, as well as science, the artist seeks the answers that tease all of humanity: who are we, where did we come from, and where are we going? Jolanta Talaikiene lives and works in the United States.