How important are your acquaintenance relationships?

As I embarked on the color theory journey along with my students, I feel that I'm getting lessons in subtlety. When you limit yourself to the very basic means, you only then start seeing nuances in relationships, in shades - those fifty shades of any color, in vibrancy, in temperature, and in transparency.

Everything doesn't need to be harsh, full of contrast, jarring in order to make an impact. Most of the time, the beauty lies in the subtle mixes of colors, and even more so in their transparent layers. An opaque layer covers all your tracks, all your moods of yesterday. While semi-opaque or translucent layers are able to neutralize if too much has been said, or add a little accent of focus.

All my life I've been searching for only the deepest relationships. It's all or nothing. You're not making it onto my friend list if we can't have the most intimate conversations. Mere acquaintances would stay by the wayside, as that's just what they were. I dismissed so many wonderful people because of this all or nothing approach. In reality, however, one can gain so much from even the smallest encounter with a stranger, or a mentor/student relationship, developing both ways. So much can be learnt from an inconsequential family visit, or a cocktail party conversation. Everything happens for a reason, and if you're only after the most idealistic statements, you miss the nuances, the everyday messages of life. I love this new bare essentials approach.

Stop projecting yourself onto others!

Last semester has been quite difficult. I kept seeing lack of progress in my students, instead noticing their repetitive mistakes. It seemed to me that some get stuck in certain areas at the expense of the whole painting. Others use way too many colors. Yet another bunch never has enough time, and most don't trust in their creativity and inner voice. These problems kept me up at night and made me rethink time and again why I'm bothering to teach at all if I see no progress in my pupils.

It's when I started this painting, which differs greatly from my typical way of thinking, when all these issues hit me all at once like a ton of bricks. As I typically paint from life, and with this endeavor I was attempting to unblock my dream painting practice, I was facing a myriad of problems all at once. How do I bring out images from within, somehow convincingly connect them, and trust myself while doing it? I had to choose colors randomly, knowing they will have a different feel when placed next to other colors. I had to properly employ perspective, and hold a palette knife just so to achieve lines of desired thickness. I had to fight with contrasts, toning and vibrancy of almost every stroke. Throughout this turmoil, my own words of encouragement kept coming back to me.

I then suddenly realized that every single problem with which I struggled was an exact flaw that I saw in others' works. Essentially, I was projecting my own fears and insecurities onto my students.

Hearing this teaching voice with its practical suggestions made it come back full circle. What I need is to experience all these problems in order to be able to teach them. I need to learn to trust my inner voice as I'm teaching. Finally, I need to go through the quest of teaching to guide my own road to painting.

This semester started on this high note! :)

Everything needs its individual attention

The question of giving every student different treatment and a varied set of tasks based on his/her personality has been haunting me for a while. Time and time again I see that inevitably one or two students in each class need a lot more time on each project than others. I feel awful hurrying them along, as typically these are the students who truly pay attention to details, are quite the perfectionists and want every one of their pieces to truly become a work of art. But then what do I do with the rest of the group? I can't constantly split up, on occasion into three separate corners - where each student is doing something different based on his/her skill set and interests. It makes me crazy, I'm feeling like my head is about to explode in all these different directions.

This painting has been attempting to give me answers to that question. I went into it with my typical expressive approach, covering the canvas at once with slashes of my favorite palette knife. It all somewhat worked, but all the elements seemed to lack their own personality. And it occurred to me that I can't treat the surface of the water in a completely identical way in which I'm handling the tree growth, or the clouds floating along. They each move in their separate way: trees reaching up, clouds circling along, water drifting in horizontal lines. I need to copy their movement with my lines, being mindful of each and every personality, so that it could be a valid form in the composition, so that all these actors can have a dialogue with each other.

And yet, these are all parts of one whole painting, and all these personalities have to coexist in it. Trees and sky reflect in the water, merging and balancing out colors, shapes and lines of the final piece. It's just like all people ultimately coexist in one society, somehow learning along the way their ways to cope with that society's demands. So then even though a conversation with each student can be slightly different - should my final goal be to teach them integration into their group? That would ultimately give them an important life lesson, correct?

How do you set your priorities?

This painting has been haunting me in its purpose because it's a sudden internal shift from trees and all their symbolism to a cityscape. Did I need to do that for more people to understand me, or was it something inside of me that wanted a new or rather re-visited challenge? The answer to this question I don't know even now after the painting is finished.

What I do know is that it was a true lesson in setting priorities. What is more important to me - the infinite sky, the haunting water, or this magical town highlighted by rays of sunshine? It was a constant adjustment of what hides and what comes out. Especially fascinating was how the darkening of one element brought out another. 

One day my friend and teacher, Andrey Tamarchenko, came to visit, and said that textures can be varied throughout - treatment of water and sky should be softer than the rough outlines of a city with its decaying walls. I ended up making the sky and water more pale, and suddenly the city became clearer, as if coming out of a mist. But it bothered me because the city wasn't my focal point. It was actually the opposite - what I loved was the cityscape's complete integration into the landscape, how it effortlessly coexisted with the cloudy sky and the murky water. I changed it yet again to level out the planes, and that made me happy. So is the lesson to take away from this process the opposite of what I'd initially thought, and in fact you can really have it all? Or that perhaps you always need to make a list of priorities?

What it feels like to paint full time

 What is different about taking myself seriously, calling myself an artist and painting almost every day? For starters, the process is a lot faster, both for getting initial inspiration, as well as the development of the piece.


It hits me, this energy that makes my fingers twitch in anticipation, like a little child's, even at the point of getting into the car and heading to the studio. The hand attaches itself to the palette knife immediately and is being led somewhere instantaneously. It feels like you never left and you simply start where your conversation with the painting ended the day before.

I am absolutely wiped out at the end of each session and I don't get the weekly insights into my inner psyche like I used to. It's a job, a demanding process that requires intense concentration, and listening to an inner voice, following what it says, despite hunger, bathroom needs, fears being pointed out constantly by my alter ego of my inadequacy, lack of time, lack of focus, etc.

And at the end it turns into a lesson in trusting yourself and your intuition when perhaps just an hour ago you stumbled in that ability in everyday life. I am so thankful to AOTA art for giving me that chance to discover what it means to be a true artist. The paintings in this post are the three large scale paintings that were chosen for Chestnut Hill's Art in the Square exhibit.

Painting is my process of empowerment

A great article in the Free Daily Press has just been published with my thoughts on what painting means to me, and what it means for me to be empowered. I never gave it much thought before I was given an opportunity to participate in this one of a kind outdoor public exhibit in Newton at Chestnut Hill Square. Please do go see it before it closes on October 17th. Here're some sneak peek photos from the opening event. Photos courtesy of Mark Wilson Images.

 

Never rush to please the crowds

A more beautiful twin trying to please the crowds - this trite phenomenon played out with this poor baby.

It was stunning from birth. I couldn't take my eyes off it and didn't quite know whether I should touch it too much in fear of ruining it. And then, right before a scheduled exhibition, this awful need to impress took over me and in a course of an hour I worked it to such a degree that it could no longer be part of the exhibit. No one noticed its absence of course, but I did. It brought me to thinking back on why I ran from the gallery world, about how I missed standing in front of the canvas and simply enjoying my process of a conversation with self. Somehow I lost track of why I paint in the first place. These attempts to get recognized, to be an official artist, to earn money as one - turned me into an obsessive attention seeker.

The adult students' behavior at the show was yet another example of simply knowing what you need as a person. It isn't laurels and clients. It's knowing that your creative energy birthed these stunning works - that's all. That's what it's about. The simplest lesson of all - do something because you need to do it, not for the sake of others' approval.

This piece is titled 'Adam and Eve'. It's been sensual, sexual, haunting and brilliant in giving me this simple truth. The bonus is that you can't ever completely destroy anything - you simply return another day and fix it, or it fixes itself...