One of Natacha Ivanova's biggest influences, she says, is Alfred Hitchcock. It is indeed tempting to think of Ivanova as one of Hitchcock's 'ice blondes' (think of Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Janet Leigh). She certainly has the looks but her smile would probably melt the iceberg that sank the Titanic.

It is difficult to reconcile this beautiful and charming lady with the stark paintings that she produces. 'I paint to explore something inside of myself, my own life vision of something', she says. 'It's not that I have only dark experiences but as you go down into yourself you find a lot of dark things'. Her work is striking and unique (she often uses herself as a model), featuring large canvases of bold, dark colours and powerful, unsettling and sometimes highly sexual imagery. Despite the smile, she takes her work seriously. She warns me that 'I am not here to make jokes. Making jokes in paintings is not my kind of thing'.

Born in Saint Petersburg in 1975, she enjoyed a long and prestigious education as an artist, despite coming from a very modest background. Both her parents are artists (they taught art to earn a 'proper' living during Communism) and she studied with her mother from the age of two. She started her painting career at the ripe age of six, when she passed her first exam for entrance to a children's art school at The Hermitage: 'As a child, it was an unbelievable chance, because The Hermitage has the best art from everywhere. There was also a very good art history teacher, which is why I like mythology so much. I learned it in my childhood'.

A teenage visit to Paris on a school trip was her first visit to a foreign country. 'The first thing that struck me was the really pink, very particular light, very different to Russian light', she remembers; 'I discovered this light; it was a big, big surprise'. She graduated with a diploma from the Johansson school of Fine Arts at the Russian Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1998, although she went to Paris in 1993 and has lived in France, more or less permanently, since then.

After The Hermitage, she enrolled at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris (alma mater of Géricault, Delacroix, Fragonard, Ingres, Degas, Monet and Renoir, among others) in 1995, graduating with a diploma in 2000. She was remarkably busy as a student. In 1996 she won first prize in the Prix du Concours Reflets de Paris and showed her work at the Rendezvous Gallery in Aberdeen. She also worked for the Comédie Française theatre company, executing 30 portraits for Offenbach's opera La Vie Parisienne, and from 1996 to 1998 was an illustrator for the monthly magazine 'Les Saisons de la Danse'.

The hitherto teetotal Natacha won the 1997 Prix du Concours Perrier-Jouët des Artistes: 'I won a six-litre Methuselah of Champagne but at the time I didn't drink alcohol at all! I only began drinking in England, so my drinking is the fault of England!' In 1999 she held a solo show at the Stephen Lacey Gallery in London (with several subsequent shows) and spent three months at the Academia di Brera in Milan as an Erasmus student.

One of the highlights of Natacha's career so far was her role as official artist of the Tour de France in 1999. 'It was an accident', she says; 'I was a student at the École des Beaux Arts and I was always looking for something to do. I applied for the Tour de France competition; you had to be able to draw somebody very quickly! I was chosen because by then I had huge experience of sketching ballet dancers'. The Tour is 'a huge organisation of thousands and thousands of people, moving together everyday. It was quite scary at the beginning! You meet a lot of other painters and writers who come to the Tour de France, that was quite interesting, too'. She made 600 drawings during the month long Tour - 'I thought that I would never draw again, my hand was aching!'

After graduating she continued to work in the opera world as a decorator at the Grand Opéra in Paris. For her, the appeal of opera is that it is 'often a very tragic story, and what I like about it is that you live a tragedy in a very short time, you have a story that goes so quickly and quite often ends badly, a tragedy rather than a happy ending'. She taught drawing at the Ateliers des Beaux Arts in 2001 and painting at the École d'Arts Plastiques in 2002, and entered the BP National Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 2001.

The conspicuous sexuality of much of Ivanova's work has some of its basis in cinematic influences. 'I am a painter but I'm not influenced by other painters as such. I'm more influenced by photography, cinema or by my own vision,' she says. Along with Hitchcock - 'he managed to create atmosphere from nothing, from just small details, the composition and angle, the light…I like his vision, he knew what he wanted' - and the Russian director Andrej Tarkovsky she cites Stanley Kubrick as a favourite. The dreamlike eroticism of Eyes Wide Shut, for instance, is seen in many of Natacha's paintings. Her 2003 work 'Dallas Family' takes its cue from the infamous Japanese hardcore film In The Realm of the Senses, showing the film's female protagonist coupling with eight members (one at a time) of the cast of 'Dallas' (the man in the ten gallon hat is surely J.R. Ewing). Her love of mythology and eroticism manifests itself in her sensual but restrained depiction of 'Leda and the Swan'.

Her work rate varies - the large Samolet II painting at Montrouge took only a month to complete, but other works can take two years or more to finish. She thinks that it is more challenging to be a female painter than a male painter: 'It's a male job. It's very physical. There's no glamour at all, it's very dirty. The paints are bad for your health. It's very solitary'.

As our chat concludes, she tells me that 'I think that what's important is someone's vision. Artists differ more in their vision that in how they actually paint. I pick up my ideas from everywhere: like Picasso said, "Bad artists copy, good artists steal"'.

When I met Natacha she wore a dress that said 'Je suis unique'.

She certainly is.

A full version of this article will appear in Artists and Illustrators, August 2006