an orb

If there is a case about my art, it is individualism. I am an individual interested in individual emotions, and in individuals in the process of experiencing them.

This painting is derived from a family member’s photo album. I see it as an iconic image. It represents an intersection of dreams and fantasies stewed from the oldest fairytales and spiced with the newest pop culture.  Where is an individual in that thick concoction? Look for it in the emotional putdown. Colors and textures seem to be an obvious expression of sensual. These painting’s colors, textures and ambiguity are all condensed to one shiny greenish orb in the girl’s hand taking place of the bridal bouquet. It contains her dreams and emotions spinning and dormant. I stirred them with my brush.        

adam and eve at last

When I posted it on FB the facial recognition app got it right. Protagonists liked it too. So it’s official now. I can be proud. I am proud. Good night.

adam and eve, a couple in love

This painting has a story. I little social story, I would say. First off, I painted it with the purpose. It is funny already because when it comes to art, the name of the game, as I understand it, is vanity. But my purpose was vane, too - a gift to my dear friends and relatives in Moscow, a couple in love. This is where the “bzzz” usually occurs; meaning that painting with the back thought of pleasing others is not a good idea.  Anyway, the result turned out to be surprising. I went to school too, you know, not for painting per say, but for architecture, and therefore learned a “good taste”. This painting defies it, I admit. I posted it on FB, as usual, and one of my former classmates commented, “SHIT!!!” I thanked him for honesty, and he replied, ‘U G L Y ! ! !” 

And then I received a private message from the protagonists of this painting asking me to remove it from the public domain. Their acquaintances started asking them questions about the status of their relationships… 

This story convinces me that the painting is worthy of public attention; meaning yours

a reciprocal love

I don’t want to be studied; I want to be loved. In this little world of ours the ways a person can be perceived publically are limited to social, political or economic issues, to mass entertainments, and to the subjects of scientific studies. The golden age of audiences gathering in candle light to appreciate artists by opening personally to their art for the sole purpose of reflection has gone. As an artist who left behind her cradle culture, I am not an issue. I am just a lonely soul, whose inner echoes deafen the noises of the streets, but whose voice is swollen by them.  Everyone who can connect and reflect, I echo you, too. I love you in the solitude of my Cave studio, working on my images. I feel that there is a reciprocal love. It must be. Otherwise, what do I feel?  

roaming

I know several ways of approaching painting. One is emulating other artist’s style. You may start from the very beginning by imagining that you are that other artist, or you can start like one artist, but then notice that something in your painting reminds you of another and move in that direction eliminating everything, which is not consistent with the style you adhere to.

Another way is preconception, conception, or design. You come up with an intellectual idea, think through the ways of visually, or otherwise, adapting it, and let yourself go through certain length of trial an error.

Another way is surrendering to Muses.  It is sweet but painful, like addiction.

It is not unusual for an artist to mix approaches in their working process.

The portrait of Nicholas Coletta, though, is a pure case of the latter approach.

When we started our session and were communicating, I absentmindedly smeared paint on the Mylar surface, until I forgot what I was doing. Nick of cause was of assistance: he drew my attention inside his vast personality so forcefully that I got totally lost there. Dizziness is one of the indicators of that. To keep from falling, but still maintain mobility, I had to hold on a hinge. That hinge was Nick’s eye, the eye on the right of the picture with the dark white. The other eye I painted super-realistically almost sweet. This contrast, the vary inconsistency of it, was important for creating a mythical landscape. Between these two eyes there was a world where I was roaming, and now, you do too.    

theater of masks

Pillow Talk, 2016, acrylic, Mylar, 48x31

People in this painting can actually embrace it; why do I always doubt?

Doubt is a bitch. 

The purpose for this painting was a gift. Would they like it if I actually wrap it and bring it to their worm and welcoming house? Is there too much implied here: the facial expressions, the scale of the figures? It all must mean something... Would they like the meaning? 

It is interesting to think about our self-image in relationship to the surrounding world. The strangers in the street, for instance, are no more detailed to us than the cutout silhouettes, but we notice peculiarities when we get to interact with them. Let's say we start relationships. To let new people into our own world, we manage to weave their sometimes troubling features into some kind of coherent mythology to match it, but by the time they become a part of our life, their appearance stops being significant again. It turns into a sort of a mask, a sign symbol for their complex personalities, a color code for their emotion in relation to ours. 

But when it comes to our own precious selves we are very selective about our appearance. We carefully examine our pictures; we don't like all of them, only some. They are usually those that don't represent us in the way we are being experienced by the others, but are more of an ideal image. And interestingly enough, that that ideal image, again, is somewhat static, more of a mask than the real alive us. 

 Greeks were right: life is a theater of masks.

two with one apple

Two With One Apple, 2016, acrylic, Mylar, 31x48

The irony about this image is that it is based on two real people who would, probably, hate to know it. It is also true for most other protagonists of my paintings. 

This particular painting has a kind of significance that real people in their everyday life may lack, but it is too brutal for anybody to be willing to say, " I see myself in this painting." 

So let's hope that no one sees themselves here.  

Red Wine

Red Wine, 2016, acrylic, Mylar, 48x72

I remember my friends, who I don't get to see too often, at a party, cradling their wine glasses. I see them so seldom that sometimes I wonder if I have invented them altogether. Why someone, who is my friend doesn't want to get in touch with me, and why do I call a friend someone who doesn't want to see me? Maybe everything, all the life outside me, is my invention, and my paintings are the only real thing. On another hand, how can I tell that my paintings are real, if they never leave the Cave, my art studio? Things can be called real only if more that one person agrees that they are, so it is easy to see why neither my friends nor my paintings are real. Reality is shared, and what is not shared is called fantasy.   

the ignored one

Fruits of Knowledge, 2016, acrylic, Mylar, 48x72

 This is how it started: I had a dream, spatial and complicated. I borrowed layers of blankets on the bed from that dream. The rest is my awaken fantasy. It meant something, but I didn't know what. One suggestion: In the old story, Adam and Eve ate an apple and went hiding because they noticed that they were naked. A man and a woman who are eating apples in this painting appear to be oblivious to nudity.

Perhaps, it has nothing to do with this painting, but I feel naked and ignored in the world of corporate art. It maddens me. No horns on my head or cunts between my open thighs can change this situation. The one who is ignored, stays ignored.    

self-portrait as a young woman

self-portrait as a young woman 2016, acrylic, Mylar, 24x36

In Moscow in the late 70's there were no styling products; heir grew organically. So did I. Cloths in the woman's sections were made of woven cotton and wool. This fabric wasn't flexible and the cuts were tailored to fit the woman's body. My body was a poor fit for the cut. Wide-shouldered and flat-breasted, I was doomed to wear boy's shirts, sweaters and pants. They, too, were ugly, but I was used to wearing them from my childhood as the hand me downs from my older brother. Along with the cloths, my brother provided me with friends; girls didn't want to play with those who were dressed like boys. When my brother and his friends turned thirteen their interests changed, and I found myself alone. The world was small; the only new friends I found were a woman 48 years older than me  with an unusual for our neighborhood fate, and a dog. This company taught me many thing but not to fit in.

I am a painter, an artist, a loner, but I am growing my hair. I don't know yet how long I will go. The goal is to fit in. Not as a woman, who wears close-fitted spandex cloths, but as an artist, who cannot find a venue to make her art known.       

babuska

The word for grandmother in Russian is BABUSHKA with the emphasis on the on the first A. My BABUSHKA was not  soft-spoken or kind-mannered. She worked her whole life and earned a lot of wealth for her family, anything that was imaginable in the communist economy of the totalitarian state. Thanks to her we lived in the capital city in two private apartments and had a summer house two hour away from Moscow.

self-portrait as a teen

As I wrote before, the gender identity issue was not totally alien to me. As a teen I looked exactly like a boy, and it was not difficult to me to act like one. It afforded me some precious freedom, because I could go  anywhere I wanted alone without a fear of being raped, but at the same time it caused me some true sadness, because I actually was always alone.  

the employee of the month

My grandma. As a young woman, almost a girl, she came to Moscow and got hired at the Stalin's Automobile Factory.
Not true.
She had already been married to a man she despised. In the village, where they were coming from there was not much choice...
In my fantasy, she had actually slept with a Jewish HR for the favor of being hired.
The fantasy was based on the fact that everybody, even Jews, had always mistaken my mother for a Jew...
But fantasies aside, my grandmother was one of the strongest women I have ever encountered.
And she was not nice.
I learned later, by my own experience at survival in the first few years of immigration, that my grandma was someone of whom I was proud to be a descender. 
   

self-portrait as a trinity

 

self-portrait as a trinity, 2016 acrylic, Mylar, 48x72

  A dreamer, a thinker and a feeler, look how their hands are interlocked! The dreamer is cutting the feeler's throat, because the feeler has a flesh, I guess; the thinker rubs her forehead with the feeler's hand, and raises another as if in a prayer for a dreamer... You may also say, the mind-body-spirit. All my energy goes into image. Words are scarce in me.

self-portrait as an artist

self-portrait as an artist, 2016, 48x72, acrylic, Mylar

It didn't take long to paint. Four hours at most. I painted it in one breath, as they say. Is there such expression in English? If not, I am borrowing it from Russian. 

I feel angry sometimes... Recently at a party a host was talking about a teenager in her family who was "transitioning to a boy." There was a pause after these news. Everyone involved in the conversation were taking it in. As for me, I was swallowing my anger. Not at the teenager, of cause, but at the gender situation in general. "...and I am transitioning to a woman," I thought. 

Funny. 

I am a female born, female raised and female living human wife and a mother of three, but an artist in me spoils the picture. 

And this is exactly what this painting represents.

And this is a reverse of this painting. Mylar is a translucent material,so this is what shows on the revers. I may like it even better

    

A Ride

Staring at people when they cannot see me is my second favorite thing. It makes me a voyeur, I guess. Anyway, this painting is based on an iPhone shot in the rear-view mirror that I took while waiting on a red light.  Words don't mean as much as images, at least sometimes…

A Rider

Most of my paintings for the last two and a half years have been painted in the 32-36X48” Mylar sheets, and I have got very comfortable with that size. Also, I have to admit, most of them don’t have much elaboration with the geometrical perspective. More or less, they all are situated in the same psychic space with no reference to a physical distance. In a way, I am waiting for the physical space, real or invented, to enter my paintings, but it might take some major change in imagination. My paintings are very much like my dreams, and my dream-space has nothing to do with the 3D.  

With the two latest paintings, though, I went to the 48X72”, doubling the size.  Now it is hard to justify.  Doubling the size is not a small thing to do, so I must have had a good reason. Yes, walking down to the shower stall by the full size mirror after the three-hour road bike ride. I’ve noticed the reflection there of a powerful female figure, beautifully and ugly simultaneously. Sweaty, red-faced, no makeup crone with the messed up hair had at the same time a youthful body dynamic that captured my imagination. And I have decided to paint a series of paintings of an actual size female figure. I am repeating myself here, but I have to, because doubling the size is not such an easy task. Doubling the size quadruples the time and magnifies the fear.

And now I am presenting the second painting of this size, and already I am promising myself to go back to my “old photographs” paintings that are practically miniatures compared to these monsters. Have I no pride?  Maybe it is just the lack of courage?

In any case, I am pleased with both large paintings…

I find it difficult, though, to keep repeating the same subject.

What I mean is that when I was starting with the ‘beautiful crone’ idea, I was going to make many of the same front figure paintings, but now I am looking at my second one and it already is totally different. Here we have a lady riding some unidentified beast, while talking on her cellphone, the fright trains and passenger plains dominating the landscape and the clouds looking down like some old gods. The painting has taken more than two weeks to paint and has reveled itself step by step, or one detail after another. When the narrative unveils like that, I neither question, nor judge it, because otherwise, I won’t be able to finish. It is corny beyond any reasoning, I know that, but what do I care? It looks unsophisticated, cute, and banal, and if I want to make sense out of it, it would get to nothing but laughter, exactly like with that old ugly lady with a beautiful body: a paradox, an impossibility, an embarrassment, so to speak, so what?      

the woman applying horns

The wife from the Husband and Wife Sleeping series woke up. Once, after the cycling trip, I caught the glimpse of her in the mirror on the way to the shower. She looked wild: all sweaty, red in the face, massed hair, powerful. The painting should be life-size, I thought. I prepared the easel: cleaned and repainted it with the fresh white, and measured a few Mylar sheets 4X6’.  But painting took much longer than I expected. Three weeks of guesswork, repainting, dream-nights, sleepless nights, making final decision to scratch it off next day. Surprisingly, the next day the painting in the Cave didn’t seem failed at all and I carried on: lots of changes, sleepless night with the same decision to scratch it off next day and to start anew, but so it happened that the next day was the day when first thing planned in the morning was the bike ride with the pro. Martin. He had been promising me that ride since forever, to take me to the point where I, the weather permits, will see the Pocono and Philadelphia skylines simultaneously. But right at the start I crushed: a hole in the pavement at the road-turn, down the hill, two sweet smiling toddlers waving their hands to us saying hello: I just took my eyes off the road. The dizziness didn’t last too long and I decided to carry on. The weather was right and we saw the skylines.  On the way to the shower few hours later the reflection was even wilder: scratches, bumps and bruises and the hair a-mass. Chocolate, wine and painting, all my favorite things, but the shoulder was hurting. If you cannot do it out of strength, do it out of weakness. That day, and the next, and I finally finished it. Here it is, The Woman Applying Horns.

seven in retrospect

Seven paintings in retrospect, acrylic on Mylar 36x48 - 34x48, 2014-2015

In the span of eighteen months, the Husband&Wife Sleeping images have been entering the Cave in the habit of dreams budding in vague formations and crystallizing in unaltered consciousness with the certainty of zodiac constellations. Number seven seems incomplete then but nothing can be done any more since she has awaken already unless she falls asleep again, which is highly improbable. 

We are all waiting for the new series now. It may be coming soon. 

 

whose dreams

I started this painting one day: it shaped itself in the first 40 minutes, I think, and then I felt weak, couldn't continue, left. Leaving the Cave is surfacing to the everyday life. I did just that. I returned to the painting a week later but couldn't finish it again. Distracted. It took another two weeks to gather courage to descend to the Cave and finish.
The wife has awaken in those three weeks. She realized that images, the property of the dreams, without words, the property of the conscious state, will be forever berried in the Cave. There is no more powerful weapon than the imageword, said the awakened wife. That was her revelation.

but i am trying

It has become so difficult to get down to the Cave!  A hermit in me gets weakened over the weekend. Not to use it as an excuse, but I got migraines in the morning. It takes an hour under the shower to cool the burn in hot hallucinating brain … Too much painting brings too much pain.  Stay away from raping the muse! Who breaks the law gets punished. My hermit and the muse are deep inside the Cave and I am too late to join them, but trying. You see, I’m trying!

mother laughing, a negative

When I look at an old photo I think of how different the formation of an image by photo-chemical processes of traditional photography is compare to digital. In traditional photography an image in the form of a negative is captured on film by photo-chemical reaction, then developed into a positive print through another chemical reaction. In digital photography, which shouldn't even be called photography --should it? --an image in the form of pixels is programmed to appear in a screen.  What does it even mean, a pixel? Information coded? Isn't an image we see as reality in fact an information we receive through chemical processes in our eye then decoded in the mind? So, film photography to an eye is what digital is to a brain.
I am an artist. An eye? A brain? No-no, I don't want to be dismembered this way! I wan to be whole.   
Looking again at the old photo of my  mother laughing, I try to reconstruct the negative. I play with my eye, I play with my mind, and my emotions. O, don't forget hands; they are always in motion! Tonight I don't have time to document the process. Too bad; at some point the painting looks really great except for some irritating flow below the corner of the mouth, which I try to eliminate and end up repainting the whole thing in the rush now.  It's feeding time already and Mark is calling me impatiently. Tuna steaks for dinner. He grills.
How to paint an old photo?  Each of my paintings so far is pointing out at different aims. I have to think. What is the painting of a negative about? Something our nowadays technology done away with? Something obsolete? Then I value it. Maybe again, it is something, which on order to comprehend, I have to twist in my mind?

acrylic on mylar

Mylar is a printing material. Makes it easy to imitate b&w photography. Finally I decided that I want just that, just an imitation. I search inside and find no poetry but imitation. After all, I come to conclusion that if I only can describe my experiences... I realize that I have to learn to communicate with myself more clearly. Strange, but I lost this ability. Could it be the change of language? 
Anyway, here is my mother, the way I know her young, her liquid laughter and her flooding nature.

more of my mother's laughing and me

Sometimes I paint out of fear to disappear.

The process, the end result,  the hope for recognition gives me hope. 

I worked so long at this painting my mother laughing that I killed it. 

Looking back, there was the stage when the as a portrait and as a painting it was better,

 

but didn't stop. It felt undercooked... Well, now it's overcooked.

With that in mind I start another painting.

 

Here my mother as the individual vanishes, but image seems cleverer to me, more universal, less personal. In other words, I like it better.

 

 Apparently, I don’t like to be personal; as a personality I strive to adhere to cultural icons, which almost means that I as an individual want to disappear. 

  

It defeats the logic.

 I use thick earthy colors

Here I am back to recognizable image.

 

I finished, and feel drained.I don't know it it's good or bad. Whose job is it to tell me? Father's, husbands, shrink's? I don't find an answer in myself. I know, it's the school that's missing...

mother laughing progress

First I flip through old photos. It fills me with emotions. I choose one to use it in my painting. It is the one that at this particular moment I am most emotionally attuned to. I try to examine its visual qualities but get confused between the primary and the secondary features. I try to figure out what is the main theme and quickly get dizzy. I take a breath and descend into the Cave. There, with the dummy of Like Totally sitting in the corner, I let go of any thoughts. I paint blindly. Camera becomes handy because it allows me to look at the process later, and hopefully analyze my painting, and hopefully understand what is the main theme and primary and secondary features to do a bit better next time. It takes a lot of effort to overcome the strength of the 'muse's' muscle to do it 'my way.' I can't stop thinking that the 'muse' of the Cave is my old fashioned father, an amateur artist himself, and 'my way' is the influence of my husband, a professional artist. This is in a way a disturbing thought, the one my analyst wouldn't approve of.
(what the f*ck, right? who cares, right?) 
P.S. As I am analyzing the process now, I see how I can strengthen the effect. But yesterday, when I was looking at the same sequence right after I washed my brushes, I felt differently. See, it can be taken in any direction. Why should it be taken anywhere, anyway?
Because when one will in me fights another will in me, it feels like an effort.    

mother laughing

My mother’s laughter had an inexplicable effect of changing all. 

Her mouth spreading beyond her face surged everything like liquid dissolving boundaries. 

The torrent of pleasure wave destroyed restrictive matter in one gulp

and swirled, and flipped, and tossed it like sparkly bobbles of high tide. 

inside the square of an acute angle

inside the square of acute angle
where father’s towered like stubborn cupboard
a rubbish like a broken pencil-holder
knocked down unintentionally off his desk
may have resulted in reproach
beneficial to his daughter’s future 
where now she has finally arrived

she splits the fiber of the pencil-holder crack 
examining it to the light from narrow window
at the desk next to the sofa 
by the wall acutely angled to the jamb 
that blocks the cupboard
towering behind crack-opened door 
out of the therapist’s office

 

This is painting in progress. When I work, I don’t think of meaning. Art has no meaning. Meaning is a curtain that blocks inexplicable.  Art is behind the curtain. Does it make any sense? I really crave for you, my audience, to bear no witness to any meaning pertaining the painting in progress I am presenting to you in this display. It would be especially dear to me since the culprit of presented painting is my own father captured in the old photo before I’ve even known him. I beg you to dismeaning it all! Witness art, will you?