Everyone can say a great deal about themselves, beloved as they are. I am no exception.
I will begin with childhood, because it was in childhood that I became aware of myself as a true Capricorn. No, I did not believe in horoscopes; I had not even heard of them. But the essential Capricorn qualities — the striving toward a chosen goal and the ability to define that goal — awoke in me precisely then.
I remember perfectly a cold January day. I am five years old. Flu is raging outside the windows, so I am not at kindergarten. My mother is at work, and the radio and I are at home. In those days the radio was almost a full-fledged member of the family: people woke up and fell asleep with it. Sometimes it sang and even told fairy tales. It probably told something different to everyone. Seeing that I had grown quiet and sad, the radio called out to me and announced that very soon, in a couple of weeks, a children’s drawing competition called “I Live on Volgograd Land” would take place at the Volgograd Museum of Fine Arts. Yes, I almost forgot to say that I lived in the young satellite town of Volgograd — Volzhsky — where my parents had come to help build it, giving up housing in Volgograd. Oh, those romantics!
But let us return to our sheep. Having heard about the competition and taken the announcement as an instruction to act, I settled down on the floor. Of art materials I had, at that moment, a sheet of squared paper and a rather fat pencil that drew red at one end and blue at the other. The pencil had two leads, and the sheet had two sides. Therefore, there turned out to be two drawings. The first was “Sea Battle”; the second was about tanks.
When my mother came home for her lunch break, I gave her the drawings and dictated the address. As she later confessed, she did not at all want to send my red-and-blue works, but it was not for nothing that I first told you I was a Capricorn: I still persuaded my mother, right before my eyes, to fold the drawing into four and seal it in an envelope, which was sent on the way back from that very lunch. We sent it and forgot about it.
A couple of weeks later a letter arrived from the Volgograd Museum, but… February, flu, a sheet folded into four…. We did not go to the exhibition opening.
Imagine our surprise — to be honest, my mother was even more surprised — when we received a second letter, this time with a more insistent invitation. My mother decided to stop by the museum, and it turned out that my “Sea Battle” had won first place!
That is how drawing, the Volgograd Museum, and the male name Seryozha entered my life all at once. That was the name I gave to a delightful German blinking boy doll in a knitted pink suit. And although I did not like playing with dolls, Seryozha was not a doll. He was a friend and a symbol. From that day on I firmly decided that I would have a son named Seryozha, and that I would become an artist. Or a ballerina.
A year later, when I had already turned six, I was sent “to ballet”. We were trained harshly; at home I practiced using the back of a chair instead of a barre, but I had real pink pointe shoes and a blue tutu. We even danced the “Blue Polka” in it. Once we were brought to a concert that was being broadcast on television, and when it was our turn to perform, different music began to play. But we coped! Perhaps we were all Capricorns?
When I was ten, I saw an announcement on the park fence saying that the first art school was opening in Volzhsky. Admission from age ten, documents required, exams on such-and-such dates. I collected all the documents myself and went to the exams alone, but I refused to go for the results without my mother: I was afraid! They accepted me.
That is how my studies began — sometimes absorbing and fascinating, sometimes tiring and difficult, but after all, we are Capricorns!
At one fine moment it turned out that drawing and dancing had begun to interfere with each other very badly. And I had to make my own first choice. I cried without stopping for a week: “Mama, tell me what to do?
- Choose.
- But what, what should I choose?
It has to be your choice, and only yours.”
Wise, wise mother of mine. On the tenth day I said that I chose art school. Six years of classes and performances, concerts and rehearsals, beautiful tutus and silk chitons were left behind. But I kept my pointe shoes for a long time. I wonder where they went?
I studied for four years at the art school with Viktor Pavlovich Filimonov, and three years in the studio of Sergei Tikhonovich Podchainov. I was very lucky with my teachers. After school came the institute. The Polygraphic Institute. Named after Ivan Fedorov. In Lviv.
And so I have been drawing since the age of five. In watercolor. In ink. With pens. Sometimes with little pencils. I have many pencils — Czech, German, English. Somewhere there is even one red-and-blue pencil. Not the one it all began with. Another one.
My diploma says: graphic artist.
I named my elder son Seryozha.
