I was born in 1970 in Saint Petersburg: school in the suburbs, social realism, Russian despair, the Mannerheim Line, the Iron Curtain, and Seva Novgorodzev. It was a childhood in a middle of a fascist country full of joyful symbols with a yearning for life that didn’t so closely resemble hell. I began to sing at a very early age, but that is not relevant here.
I tried to keep up my education, and even graduated from something, becoming a paramedic with the State emergency services. I tried to study biology in graduate school, but failed due to my fundamental difference of opinion in human values, indignation with totalitarianism, inability to concentrate, general ignorance, intrinsic stupidity, and anger. I discovered the pleasure of reading very early. I would read my beloved books over and over - a habit that I keep to this day. My favorites include: Two captains, Tom Sawyer, The Happy Loser, and Turkmen folk tales. At some point, I began to do some writing. At first, it was just letters to relatives, but later it became observations of the Great Crested Newt (Triturus cristatus), Long-Eared Owl (Asio otus), and the Steppe Agama (Trapelus sanguinolentus). Later I wrote a work describing the habits and characteristics of a regional raven family of birds (gray and black crows, magpie and others). Romantic teenage poems that followed were always candid and full of snot and tragedy. To this day, I do not understand why I wrote them. I did not mean to show them to anybody then and even more so now for I am unable to read this lyrical nonsense without extreme discomfort. I have traveled extensively: to different countries, continents, climates, and languages. I grew feeling angry towards everything and everyone. I began to write nihilistic poetry and prose, filled with obscenities, pathological sexuality, dissatisfaction, disappointment, frustration, insolence and resentment. At my first public readings, some of my friends were offended and so was I! But some of them enjoyed it very much. My muses then were Igor Golubentsev and Nashata Barash. Then came the Internet, blogs, forums and with them, the style and attitude of the writing culture began to change. Now my life is surrounded by Germans, Berlin, leftist Europe with it cultural relativism and political correctness as a substitute for censorship, that disgust me so much in Russia, an eternal autumn, acorns, and unsanitary conditions together with my never-ending struggle to comprehend myself. The thought of the future brings joy and encourages me, but it's hard to say what it encourages me for. On top of all that, I draw pictures and paint. I like to show, sell, and sometimes give away my art to good people. That is why I sometimes call myself an artist. To compose self-reflection as an artist is a hard undertaking. Necessity to escape pomposity, pseudo intellectuality, tendency to use words with meaning close to nothing and to duplicate other writing materials i.e. professional art-critics making it even harder. Long enough I have searched for such a professional to write a piece about me. To no avail. Finally I got fed up and now I write it myself. The way I’m able to. I began drawing before I started walking, maybe later, difficult to say. Neither had remained in my memory. First as everybody else I just smeared huge doodles on paper: nor the doodles or clear memory of them had remained. After that was plastilin: I sculpt Busts and painted them with gouache: vividly, how Hindus paint their little statues of multiple Gods in their Mandirs. It brought me a lot of pleasure. My mother did not like that: Plastilin produced a lot of filth. Plastilin was surreptitiously removed from usage. That way I did not became a sculpture. I continued to paint with gouache using it as an oil-paint, covering paper with fat layers. I liked thick volume. My father had explained to me that that is not the way you use a gouache that is how you paint with an oil-paint. But there was no oil paint. Painting overall wasn’t encouraged, too messy. Then followed a drawing class in school: last punch to my art longing. With the time father had to prepare my art homework. Mother was unhappy that I am not able to do it myself. I wasn’t bright enough to remind her about Plastilin. There was however one happy moment: painting the wood fence around our summer house on finish territory in Karelian schism, near Lembolovo, that Russians occupied after Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed. The fractured wood sticks almost lost its integrity, color or smell and were more of a dry sponge than a wood. The oil paint was very thick I dilute it with Olifa- Drying oil, and then enjoyed as paint soaked in already cracked wood, that suddenly was becoming green. Later on came the nursing school and overdue puberty. I have discovered the beauty of female body in maternity ward and abortion clinic. Modigliani drove me mad; it seemed at time that if somebody had managed to paint some of a kind he could consider life worth a while. I tried to paint something alike, haven’t succeeded. Simple portrait took weeks to paint. Occasional success to depict some body parts filled my life with meaning. Now I have studio and people paying money to have my works. And I’m in vain trying to recreate those doodles, which brought me so much pleasure in childhood. Edit this text to create your own blog post. To edit, simply click directly on the text. Break up your text with more than one paragraph for better readability. Add images, page breaks, and links to complete your blog story. Edit this text to create your own blog post. To edit, simply click directly on the text. Break up your text with more than one paragraph for better readability. Add images, page breaks, and links to complete your blog story. |