Films, books, paintings

January 13, 2021

Hello my friends.

I didn’t write for a long time and realized how I missed describing my everyday life of artist.

Here I am, writing about the first 10 days with the number 2021.

The dive into the new year happened just in the magic night and transferred me into the meditative realty. On 1 January I felt not very well and discovered I had the most popular disease of today. There is one advantage – I was mildly sick and so I was spending my week with books, films and paintings. All around me there was untold silence which let me have  it all more than ever.

First I was thrilled by the idea that it was possible just to lie on the sofa punishment-free and watch all the interesting films in the world.

I started with a gloomy film “Midnight Sun” about Lappish voodoo. I sometimes like eerie   movies with Nothern landscapes and rough faces.

A bit later I came back to art through the films about Egon Schiele.

You can’t confuse Egon Schiele’s art with anybody else’s. His works stop you with frank poses, dramatic lines and odd color forms around the figures. Egon Schiele is a prominent personality in art who influenced the following generations of artists. I was curious to look into his history.

I watched two films: “Egon Schiele. Death and the Maiden” and “Scandal”. The first one impressed me with movie characters, and the other one with the portraits of heroes and the beauty of scenes.

I also found a documentary about his paintings and a lecture by Irina Kulik, where she examines two artists who changed the idea of the human body perception: Egon Schiele and Hans Bellmer.

All this led me to the thought of Vienna, thanks to my readers on social networks, who told me about a big collection of Egon Schiele’s paintings in Leopold Museum. I put this place on my wish list for the future.

I also watched the action-packed, but not very deep movie “Play Back”, with Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman, and in the evenings finished reading Denis Gardari’s book “The Paths of Art”.

This book brought me back to my own meanings and to looking through different artists’ albums and collections of paintings.

Reading the book, it was pleasant to remember the artist and producer Rustam Khamdamov. I love his drawings for the fluidity of lines and vivid characters.

I planned to re-watch his movie, and since I don’t know how to postpone anything, I watched the next evening three films in a row: “My heart is in the mountains”, “Diamonds. Theft” and “A Bottomless Bag”. The latter was with the magnificent Nemolyaeva in the title role. These are films-meditations, films with a retro mood, beautiful, strange and they stuck deeply in my mind because of this. They made me stay a little more horizontal.

It doesn’t mean that I have not thought at all about paintings lately. They are always in my mind. Everything described above is like a magnificent screen through which you watch parallel stories.

In between watching movies and reading, I drew sketches for a new series. I was pleased with some of them, and I’m going to make the most promising ones in large formats. I began several new paintings, large and small.

One of the new paintings is a diptych. I started it, as usual, with amorphous spots – I really love this first stage. Once again, I appreciated the abstractness of the forms, but did not stop at this point. I’ll leave it for sketches and small formats. Details were appearing in the diptych and changing all the time from generalization to specific forms and back to integrity, from medium tone to light and back.

In order not to disappear from my social networks, one of these days I rolled up pastel sticks from pastel dust and published a video about it in Instagram stories.

Some of you might have already done it, but with those of you who haven’t I’m sharing a video.

See you soon!