I have recognized my last posts have been pathetic. Probably it is because for me important is not what happened to me, but the thinking I am having at the moment. I shouldn’t hide myself behind though, as I am still not a pure thought. There’s no point in keeping a list of what I am and what I am not. We need to start somewhere anyway. So I am a painter, if I can separate being in personalities. I’ll better say, I am a painter too. Painting for me is a very personal thing. It is suffering, and a pleasure too. I struggle because it is never perfect, it is never as you expect it to be; and enjoy it for the same reason. That’s why it is a very personal. I always feel like being naked when somebody’s else sees my painting. They are the mirrors, so I mostly hide my paintings, as dog hides a bone and always feel shy to show them. I trace my life through paintings. These traces are of more importance and relevance for me than numbers detaining years. This thing happened when I was doing that painting, or in between of those ones. I am not very productive, because I paint when I feel like, and I feel different every day. As every painting has a story and every painting represents time, I want to flip through my archives and post paintings what I find with stories they belong to. If the collection of my posts is something what represents my life, I can’t make it complete without paintings anyway. It’s enough of explanations. As I wanted to write today about deeply personal matters, I will start from love.
Love (Portrait of Mayuko Ogawa, circa we just have met).I remember first time I have met my wife very clearly. A good friend, South Korean anarchist, obsessed with tofu, guitar, girls, communist revolution and poetry, former maths teacher in exile, Puma, just came back from what he called Anarchist European Run, meaning hitchhiking and using any means to get around. He was arrested in the end in Germany for sleeping in phone booth. Though he didn’t have money at all, generally sleeping rough and surviving on scarce donations of his friends and supporters of his revolutionary ideas combined with redestribution of goods by means of looting shops on the way, he managed to put on some extra weight and write a book of poetry. We were out having fun. The party was in ‘Jaguar shoes’, an obscure fashionable club in Shoredich. A friend of us was performing videoprojections. We were getting drunk hanging around with a bunch of friends we met there. This is how Naz introduced me to Mayuko and how I lost Puma. I was absorbed in that Japanese girl’s smile, the widest smile I have seen in my life, so I do not recall when he disappeared, to be not seen for nearly a year again. As this is not a memory about Puma, he vanishes from this post at this point too. I called her next day. We decided to meet in Nothing Hill. It kicked at once. I remember her biting my face and being lost on the way back. I could recognize the streets but couldn’t remember the way to my house.
I remember falling in love. It was not like falling through something, as you see in movies, but rather descending in circles, like a leaf from a tree. Me meeting her at the station on unicycle, just to see her smiling again. Us, spraying stencils of “cave drawings” around London: a group of hunters, throwing spears. Running away antilope. Some more cave people and extinct animals. We saw each other every day. I loved her smile, and 7 dots as 7 stars on her face, and her name, which, being translated from Japanese meant Freedom River. 
It was perfect time. I remember “future sound of spring party” in the end of February, after long, cold winter in Torpedo factory.For the last four or five months I couldn’t escape from wind. I lived in a disused factory building, designed for making torpedos and bombs during the war, and who knows what before, as it was one of the factories built in the time of the beginning of the industrial revolution. Many windows were missing. I lived on a ground floor, in a massive space with gaping holes. So I often shared it with a random pigeon. Sometimes we didn’t have electricity. It had to be taken secretly from running just behind factory’s wall Silverlink intercity railway. We shared one line between 7 of us. If you wanted to switch on a cooker you had to go around and ask others to switch off heaters for a while. It was a very beautiful place.
Soon after the party we had eviction on a very short notice. I couldn’t find a place to move to. I was about to be in the street. A friend of us, Uri came with a big truck for moving horses. You could put inside a whole apartment block. I didn’t have to leave many things behind this time. Me and 4 of my other friends with staff hardly occupied half space inside the wagon.
As I didn’t have a place, we dropped off my staff in Mayuko’s place, AKA the Yellow Kitchen. And this is how we started to live together. Love was the first painting I made in the Yellow Kitchen.
Boris Kislitsin
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