“I am going to the gallery. I need to finish work, frame a few things, set up the exhibition. In four days there is a new show. Together with my colleague, the painter Alexander Zakharchenko. Suddenly it occurs to me that almost all my solo exhibitions fall at the end of the year. The previous one, in Volgograd, opened at the end of December. The year before that, in France, in Dijon, at the end of November. What is it — a desire to sum things up, or is my December birthday acting as a decoy, demanding a holiday?”
We offer readers a monologue by the artist Elena ORLOVA.
An exhibition. A time for gathering stones. A chance to show those close to me what I have drawn, invented, seen in dreams. Close people — because when you make an exhibition, you think about them: how will they perceive it? What will they say? Everything left unsaid in life one wants to say through drawings. Through poems. An attempt at dialogue...
I placed on the walls what I had managed to finish and frame. Works that have gone beyond personal space are perceived differently — as if from outside, through other eyes.
Still lifes. I love flowers very much. Trembling, living, bright. It is so interesting to try to convey their trembling, defenselessness and defiant ceremonial quality through line and color. It seems that flowers were what pushed me toward “inventing the bicycle” — toward this almost pointillist manner of painting, not very customary in watercolor. I want to break local color down into its components, though what local color can flowers possibly have?
No, I will not show illustrations at this exhibition. Let us leave them for the future. But sketches of sets and costumes — definitely. During the last three years theatre has appeared in my life. At first it appeared at my exhibition in the person of the handsome, talented and theatre-mad director of the Volgograd Theatre for Young Audiences, Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Albert Avkhodeev. Then it materialised as a phone call: “Lena, let’s do McDonagh. I’ll stage it, you design it.” And I realised I was lost. Theatre, like the beautiful song of a mermaid, beckoned and drew me in. It was difficult, but interesting.
Design sketch for the production “Billy,” based on Martin McDonagh’s play “The Cripple of Inishmaan”
We came up with living water — a pool with water and a real boat. The illusion of the island was also supported by water on the screen. I remember that once, six months before the premiere, a night phone call woke me: “Lena! Everything is wrong, the Irish have different hats!” I wanted so much to sleep. I was even shivering with fatigue, yet I lay there and smiled.
I will never forget the feeling of exultation at that first premiere of “Billy,” based on “The Cripple of Inishmaan.” In the auditorium, when I watched the action breathlessly. On the stage, where I came out for a bow together with the actors and the director. Backstage, where every moment someone said: “Congratulations on the premiere!” A feeling of unity, when everyone is a part of you — actors, stagehands, lighting technicians, spectators. Or rather, you are a part of that great and beautiful marvel. A year later came the second premiere — Rostand’s “The Romancers.” Thank you, theatre.
It is funny. I suddenly thought that everything important in my life has been as if accidental, as if not mine. First the studio. I returned to Volgograd after graduating from the Lviv Polygraphic Institute, seeing myself in dreams and plans solely as a graphic artist and illustrator. I drew fairy tales, became fascinated with linocut, and suddenly, unexpectedly, at a meeting of the artists’ union I was offered the chance to teach at a club for amateur artists and to create a children’s studio, so as to preserve the premises for both. “Oh no, no!” I answered. “I don’t know how one teaches drawing.” But never say never. I did come to have a look. I liked it. I agreed. A year later awards began to arrive. Grand Prix in Moscow and gold in Tokyo, and also Delhi, Helsinki. Today my students have more than fifty gold and silver medals alone, and exhibitions all over the world.
But the wonderful children’s drawings — bold, direct, spontaneous — became so precious that we decided to create a children’s gallery in Volgograd. When I first came to the city and regional authorities with this idea, I met with bewilderment: “What, hang children’s scribbles on the walls?” In 2010 the gallery will celebrate its twentieth anniversary. True, we had to work together with ministry officials to develop its structure and staffing table: there were no analogues in Russia. It is wonderful that now we are not alone. And children’s drawings look astonishing on the walls. Sometimes one even encounters masterpieces.
Then students appeared in my life — from the Volgograd State Institute of Arts and Culture, where I head the Department of Decorative and Applied Art, and from the Institute of Art Education of Volgograd Pedagogical University, where, as “half a professor,” I teach painting.
We draw, communicate, learn to see and think. To love graphics, which is laconic, sharp and intelligent. It requires style, and aestheticism is possible in it. To love painting, because painting is love itself. Like poetry. Yes, three years ago poems also came into my life. Precisely came. They settled inside me and poured out of me. For a long time I even kept a notebook and pen under my pillow, because I often woke from those lines.
Pea soup on the stove
Softly breathes its heat.
We are all close in Christ
In this large, old house.
The dim light of a warm room,
Behind the wall someone laughs,
And onto a heap of old newspapers
I sweep the shards of a saucer.
I break them on the floor for luck,
Only where is it, this luck?...
The city has awakened. Outside the window it is becoming lively. It is time to open the gallery doors to visitors. An exhibition. Another stage. Another summing-up.
Late autumn. Time to gather stones. It is wonderful that I have all this: my paintings, my poems, my gallery, my loved ones, my friends. My students, my exhibitions. And love. I am certain that the main thing in life is love.
Elena Orlova,
Director of the Volgograd Regional Children’s Art Gallery, Honored Worker of Culture of the Russian Federation
Elena Orlova is a graduate of the Ivan Fedorov Lviv Polygraphic Institute and a graphic artist.
She is a member of the Union of Artists of Russia and of the International Association of Art — AIAP UNESCO.
She has participated in international, all-Russian, regional and oblast art exhibitions. She has held solo exhibitions in Belgium (Liège), France (Dijon) and Volgograd.
She actively contributes illustrations to the children’s magazine “Prostokvasha.” As a scenographer she designed two productions at the Volgograd Theatre for Young Audiences: “Billy,” based on Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” and “The Romancers,” based on Edmond Rostand’s play of the same name.
Works can be found on the website http://www.lenaorlova.ru/
Elena Orlova
***
I take my black pencil
And draw a white blizzard,
An old city — new gouache,
And my hopes — watercolor.
Bright Prussian blue —
The sky above your head.
A drop of umber for storms of the soul
And ultramarine for you and me.
On the palette — a scarlet spot,
With a palette knife — the line of fate,
With a fine pen — what is destined,
White and black — all the ifs and buts.
I wish I could paint your eyes —
Yellow ochre and watercolor Mars.
Only I cannot understand who said
That there is only one ultramarine for us?
A washed-away profile — the water has spread.
Cadmium and carmine — a merging of lips.
Paints that always run out
Inside the skin of tortured tubes.
Never mind, it will pass, do not frown!
I will go looking in the shop
For yellow ochre, Prussian blue,
And for you and me — ultramarine.
***
I draw you,
But it is not you.
And in anger I
Tear off the sheets.
A simple pencil —
An enemy in the struggle,
Gouache smashed
Like a challenge to fate.
How can one convey
The movement of a hand?!
I draw again —
And the sheets are torn.
Under a layer of acrylic
Someone else’s features.
I have studied everything,
But it is not you!
Powerless, turning pale,
To tear the paper!
I simply do not know
How to draw you!
***
Life follows its own signs:
A snowy winter is coming.
My hands, so tender,
Remain a night-time ghost.
I live as if writing a draft,
My hair uncombed.
Foreordained, predestined
Are only grey-black stripes.
I will exchange complex words
All down to the smallest coin, with nothing left.
Unkissed, uncared-for
Are my lips, so sweet.
Student Meridian, 2010, No. 1
|
|
 “Irises”, paper, watercolor |
 “Poppy Seed Pods”, paper, watercolor |
 “Peonies”, paper, watercolor |
