My allergies and asthma made it impossible for me to become friends with oil paint. But perhaps I am being a little disingenuous here, because my relationship with watercolor is of a different kind.
Our home was a women’s kingdom. Our family union of four consisted of my mother, my grandmother, my sister, and me. My grandmother had a small pension, and my mother had a salary — she was a head librarian, but still, it was a library salary. And yet, from my very first year at art school, I always had Leningrad watercolors, which I fell in love with at first sight. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: at the first brushstroke? Those were different times. It was absolutely impossible to find Leningrad watercolors in shops. My mother brought paints for me from business trips and asked acquaintances to get them.
My first Kolinsky sable brush was given to me by the director of the art school. During the summer holidays after, I believe, my second year of art classes, Viktor Pavlovich strictly instructed us to paint studies. I asked how many were required, and Viktor Pavlovich replied: the more, the better. I suggested: “A hundred?” — and somehow it turned into a bet. I insisted that I would paint 100 studies over the summer; he doubted it.
All summer long I painted like mad. I painted trains and railway tanks at the station, the pier on the Akhtuba River, flowers at the dacha. And when in August my mother took me to the sea on a doctor’s recommendation, to treat my constant tonsillitis, and I found myself in Koktebel, I did not let go of my sketchbox from morning till night.
When I came back to art school after the holidays, Viktor Pavlovich asked me in front of everyone: “Well, Lena, did you paint a hundred studies?” I was ashamed to admit that I had lost the bet. There were only 87 studies. Viktor Pavlovich hugged me, said that I had done very well and that 87 was almost 100, and gave me a brush, saying that I had earned it.
That was how I gradually became spoiled and grew used to good materials. Not a very useful habit, I must say, for those times. And even less so for these times…
When I was in the 10th grade, a classmate asked me to make a wall newspaper for the housing office where his mother worked. Of course, I agreed. I still have not really learned how to refuse requests, and in those days it was absolutely impossible. As a result, there are tons of wall newspapers in my personal history! I drew wall newspapers for kindergarten, for the school my elder son attended, and for the hospitals where my younger son was treated. But the most memorable one will always be the newspaper I drew for the walls of a maternity hospital one week before my eldest was born — he clearly did not like it at all.
I no longer remember what exactly I drew for the housing office, but in exchange for the sheet of Whatman paper I had used for the wall newspaper, my classmate’s mother brought me a sheet of Goznak watercolor paper! Seeing my eyes nearly roll back in delight, she said that they had more of it at the housing office. I exchanged my Whatman paper for their Goznak paper at a ratio of two to one, which surprised them greatly and made them very happy: newspapers looked better on Whatman paper, and its edges were even, unlike those of Goznak paper.
Later, during plein-air sessions at Korovin’s dacha in Gurzuf, I found myself, as if in Aladdin’s cave, in an artist’s shop, where I stocked up for many years on watercolor pads and Kolinsky sable brushes.
These days, I use only small brushes, even for large formats. But what can I do? I love good, dense watercolor paper in large sizes. I love a good Kolinsky sable brush — thin and vulnerable. I love watercolor. As they say in a popular film about Moscow, tears, and unbelief: “I love because… I love.”
