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?

papa

In this photo he is young, twenty maybe. I met him later. By then papa changed glasses to more fashionable style in rectangular frames of pale horn. The black wheels in the old photo brought unfamiliar element to his familiar features disturbing in my early childhood, as an inkling that they used to live here before, in the realm unreachable to my memory.

I became aware of the boundaries of my personal memory in the summer of 1960. My family was getting ready for vacation at the place “...where we were last summer…” “Mama, I don’t remember going there last summer!” “It’s because you didn’t go, my dear.” “Where was I?” “You stayed in the village with grandma; you were too young to travel.” “Did Serezha travel?” “Yes.” “But I don’t remember the summer without Serezha!” “But you were too young to remember! You weren’t even talking, yet.”

What a revelation! There was time in my life that I didn’t remember!

For many nights to come I tried to extend my memory beyond the threshold.  The limitations faced on those nights were devastating. Later I learned that people customary put  language labels like god or otherwise what-have-you notions to help to feel ok about limitations. But even though the scare of where I was before birth remained more persisting than the uncertainty of where I go after death.

my brother and I

I am three in this picture; the human being next to me is my brother, Sergey.We were born three years and 24 hours apart; first him, then me. Serezha we called him, and this name was the best sound for my ears. How much I loved him! I wanted to be a boy, like him. Boys were better than girls, because Serezha was a boy. Marriage was a mystery, but if I could have married my brother it would had made more sense to me, except it was unnecessary because we were always together. What a happy girl I was to wake up every morning to his companionship and to fall asleep every night in the same room with him! My happiness lasted for twelve years. After that is was harder and harder to keep up with him, to the point that I lost him entirely. By my thirty we had nothing left to talk about. I certainly made mistakes too, but I never regretted, just went on living, so that by the time he had actually died of aneurism at the age of 59, I hardly felt any difference. I kissed his cold forehead and felt sad, but wanted to feel sadder for the loss of my brother, for the loss of my childhood, for the loss of the clarity and the pure joy of a childhood play! How easy I let go of my brother! I still cannot understand what happens to children when they grow up. Life is a mystery, don't you agree?    

a river trolley

Last night I dreamed that I was painting this painting again, but paining it was not enough, because there had to be an idea. The idea of the painting in my dream was rusty and urine-like. The lines were made with amber-clear urine, and the subjects were painted with the dry rusty paint. It was so meaningful and beautiful that I woke up happy. Today I am just too tired. I am curios though. I want to paint this old photograph again.
What does it mean, rust and urine? All solid bodies were rusty and the boundaries between them leaky like urine... and the water in the Moskvareka was cloudy like unhealthy urine, and flew by like life- right?- and we, the subjects of this painting, thinking ourselves solid, in fact were formed of fragments of powdery rust ready to fall apart, and the only thing that held us together was our own bodily liquid that also united us. 
This painting belongs to The Old Photos series. My brother is looking ahead and I am sitting on my father's lap. Much later, in the "real life" my brother would be carried away from us with the cloudy waters of life. Three years ago he had died and was berried on the high bank of Moskvaraeka in some overpopulated fast growing cemetery.
In the sixties, when we were kids in Moscow, the ferries on Moskvareka were called "river trolleys." 

no man ever steps twice in the same river

This picture captures their visit to Avtozavodskaya, the place in Moscow her family has moved out from two years before for better living conditions. For Lena two years is one fourth of her life and walking on familiar bank of the Moskva-reka makes her feel that no man ever steps twice in the same river. Dressy coat awkwardly fits small shoulders used to her brother’s hand-me-downs. Papa asks to hold an autumn maple leaf for the picture, making her shyness spike at the responsibility. She candidly attempts to smile…

the myths

...and if life consists of myths, let this be one of them, the myth of ultimate love. My childhood, my mother; just tell me how a weak woman could have cast such a powerful spell on me as my mother has done, and I am not an easy prey, I'm telling you. I have been going rounds about it my whole life. She is a genius, she is the only one. No matter what "reality" is, no matter the science of psychology, I refuse to believe that crap; I believe only in her, in the truth of the Never Land, an eternal childhood, for that what she has been for me, never mind the rest of our lives, the "reality" that dawned on all of us later including my brother's death... who cares, for my mother has been able to provide that fairytale of a childhood that no one besides us have known. There is no a greater artist in this world than my mother, Zoya Drozdova born Vlasova, and I am writing these words while she is still alive!   

Baltic Breach

Baltic Beach, acrylic, Mylar 32x24 is my second painting based on the old black and white pictures I brought back from my trip to Moscow. Let's call it a series now. The Old Photos series. What do I want to achieve? Definitely not the realistic affect of an old black and white photo. To me it is a trip to the past, some of which I may not even remember. In this picture my brother, mother and I are walking along the Baltic beach. My father is taking this photo. It was such a happy time for all of us! I must be ten or eleven there; Serezha thirteen or fourteen. My mother was the prettiest woman at the beach, never self-conscious of it, consumed with her children and husband. It was the time of  harmony. I want to do another take on this shot. I am interested in showing how at that moment both mother and brother are looking at me. I always liked sharing my thoughts with the others. They seem to be really interested....   

Old Photos: my mother and her astray father

On the right is my mother. There has never been a human being more beautiful than her. It has been true for when I have been a child and remains so to this day. My Mother, Zoya Matveevna Vlasova, is the most beautiful human being on this planet. On the left of this 'old photo painting' (Acrylic, Mylar 21x32) is her father, Matvey, who evacuated with his factory in 1941 leaving behind his wife, my grandmother, and 11 y.o. Zoya, to the city panicking over advancing Nazi army.  His daughter from another marriage is in the middle. Her name escapes my memory. I've never met my biological grandfather, but still remember the awkward visit many years later of my mom's half-sister...  

Portrait of Ruthann

Ruthann has been cool about my helpless attempts to catch resemblance. My painting process is very much defined by material. Mylar doesn't absorb paint. It allows me to move it like catchup over a plate until a painting starts looking like something.
By the time Ruth has had to leave, the portrait looked nothing like her. She has noticed that I continued dubbing and said, "Don't see me off, keep painting." Her eyes have caught light. I've run back to the easel easing myself into the painting. It's taken me only a few minutes to finish.
I keep reminding myself that there is always the next move. A work is never a failure, unless I stop working.

Self

In dry brush and pale cobalt I sketched two heads in upper and lower parts of Mylar sheet mirroring each other and, suffocated, couldn't continue. I sat in front of it for an hour, and left. 

A day later the migraine broke in. Numbed with 800 Advil, unable to tie two strings of thought together I descended into the Cave.

"A thought is a rope," I thought, "a rope is a line, and I am incapable of thinking."

 Ignore the ropes of drawing and delve into the color, lets the air in and breath!

Alive and Dead

This is how the process goes: first an idea, a visual thing. It appears on the "mental screen", I see obscure shapes and don't grasp the meaning yet. Next, I stand in front of the 'blank canvas" lost, helpless, and fearful.
For the Alive and Dead what I knew was that the mother's belly had to be moon-like, that the baby had to silhouette against its light like a fly on a lampshade, and that the mother should have had my face upside down. What I didn't know was what brush to use first, wide or narrow, what paint put on the pallet, and what to start sketching.
Day one: 50 min, a sketchy sketch in pale blue in medium brush. Ah, how grateful I was to Mark that he called me for dinner!
Day two: the whole thing almost finished in two hours. I didn't dare to look at it yet; I let my conscious mind to check out while my hands and eyes working.
Day three: taking a photo and examining it on computer screen.
Day four: while driving, having an idea  of one skeleton hand and the night sky .
Day five: finishing the whole thing in one hour. Same day: taking a photo, having an idea of the title while driving, and posting it on blog and facebook.
Tad-aah!