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). Continue reading ‘Love’
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“I am one of the forgotten ones who refuses to be forgotten.” -M. O’Reilly
Once I have heard a story about one Japanese painter. Unfortunately I do not know his name. Anyway, as far as the story goes, he started to paint rather late, like Van Gogh, in his early thirties. Soon he abandoned his job and commited all his life to painting. He lived long and died in his eighties. He never married or had any children, as he devoted all his life to his art. He produced a large body of works, well over 3000 paintings and countless sketches. He struggled most of his life, though in his late years he became very well known, and could sell his works well.
That’s not the point, though such a commitment deserves respect. What really fascinates me is the subject he had chosen: a coffee pot. He painted nothing else, but one and the same coffee pot for nearly 60 years. After his death not a single sketch or painting with anything else but this pot was found. My first reaction to this story was laugh. How strange it was: to spend all your life doing nothing else but painting endlessly, over and over without a shadow of doubt or showing any interest in a different subject same object, a coffee pot. I thought he didn’t have any imagination, or was caught in the frame of his routine. I know some people who never ventured as far as 50 kilometres away from the place there they were born; they were fine with that and didn’t see any point in going somewhere else. Was he like them? Or maybe he could see something else in that pot every time he would paint it? Was his life a quest for perfectness? What was in this pot for him, and why he had chosen a coffee pot anyway?
I wanted to find answers, but more I thought about him, more questions I had. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I wish I could find an album of his paintings. It is my dream for a long time, but I couldn’t come across it. They told me there’s one, compromising all his life span and works. I imagine a very thick folio, few thousands pages thick, each of them depicting a coffee pot. I long to leaf through those pages, from his first drawings to the last unfinished work. I want to solve this mystery. Some people say, I’d love to meet Jesus Christ or Buddha, or have a chat with Lao-Tse, Pope or Leonardo da Vinci. If I’d have a chance, I’d like to meet this Japanese painter, whose name I don’t know and whose paintings I’ve never seen.
Boris Kislitsin
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I came across an article called “The culture of memory” a couple of weeks ago: http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.html A quote from there:
…Any earlier than about 3.5 years is, for most of us, a blank slate. We all have what Freud first called “childhood amnesia”–an inability to remember our earliest childhood. Ask a Maori New Zealander about his or her earliest memory, though, and you might find that the childhood amnesia ended a bit sooner. A Maori’s first memory might be of attending a relative’s funeral at 2.5 years old. A Korean adult, on the other hand, might not remember anything before age 4. Memory varies widely from person to person. Researchers have also found that the average age of first memories varies up to two years between different cultures. “We think that this is a function of the meaning of memory within a particular cultural system,” says Michelle Leichtman, PhD, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire who studies childhood memory. People who grow up in societies that focus on individual personal history, like the United States, or ones that focus on personal family history, like the Maori, will have different–and often earlier–childhood memories than people who grow up in cultures that, like many Asian cultures, value interdependence rather than personal autonomy…on average, Asian adults’ first memories were later than Caucasians’ (57 months as compared with 42 months). Maori adults’ memories reached even further back, to 32 months on average.
So, what would be my first memory? Here’s another one. I guess I was around four. I remember I was sick. My mother took me to hospital by sleds. I was completely covered in blankets and my head wrapped in my grandma’s shawl. On the way back from hospital my mother bought me a car to play with. I built for this car a track and ramp from my books. I was so excited playing with them I pissed in my knickers. I was afraid my mother would blame for this, so I went up to the radiator of central heating. It was mounted by the window, so I climbed on my little stool and pressed my knickers against it. It was in the winter, so the radiator was quite hot. I stood like this for a while, watching snow falling and people making their way on the icy pavements, and cars stuck in the snow… until my knickers got dry.
What I wanted to say, it took me about 20 minutes or so… watching snow. It was so beautiful to see its falling and everybody in the street didn’t seem to pay any attention to it… Continue reading ‘Culture, memory and snow’
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I have got used to changing places, countries, and places within countries. I moved a lot. Every time I moved I had to leave things behind. Every time you move you have to redefine what is important. When I was leaving London for good, I counted how many places I’ve changed for nearly 5 years living there. I counted 14; most probably I’ve forgot some of them. 14 times I had to pack and unpack things in a new place. Moving within one place is one thing. You can carry or move most of your staff with you. Moving things by hand, by underground and on the bus, moving things in a friend’s car, moving things in a hired van, moving things in a track for moving horses; finally moving things in supermarket trolleys with friends also can make a nice memory.
There were 3 of us, and we were broke. So we pushed our trolleys all the way down from Hackney to Angel, sharing a bottle of Teacher’s to warm up in a pissing November rain. We were artists; most of the staff we moved (and had) were paintings. Generally, if you want to paint, everything will do. Walls, doors, pieces of wood, carton boxes… Most of this you leave behind when you move.
Finally leaving London for good I had to pack everything what is important. I thought it’s funny to define importance of things by their weight: 20 kilos of necessary things and memories in total. … I had to damp or give away everything exceeding those 20 kilos, including many paintings once again. The dearest ones I stripped off from frames and rolled though; never to be stretched again as a matter of fact: because I never settled down. I remember places by things left behind. I’m not attached to things; on the contrary. I just try don’t keep anything what I don’t need. My wife told me as while visiting her friend in Sardinia, she was shown a wardrobe full of T shirts and clothes her friend used to wear since high school: that was her way to keep track of her life. So I keep my track by abandon things.
Sometimes we don’t have chance to pack things; rather we left with what we have. A few days ago I left my home in the morning in rush with a feeling I’m not coming back. Details are irrelevant, what is important is what all I had was my handbag with which I headed to work. Continue reading ‘Things we belong to’
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