The life in Fairytales
By
Miami, Florida, USA
A thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Fine Arts
Department of Visual Arts
Miami International University of Art & Design
December,2021
Introduction
At 12midnight my mother and I proposed a toast to a wonderful Happy New Year of 2015. One hour later, we were in a cab driving to the airport. Since that moment, my life has changed, that plane took me away from my Russian motherland to my new home ,the United States. Now the ocean separates me from my past.
I began painting as a very young girl and that has became a nostalgic element that brings me back home. Living far from my motherland and being faced with a difficulties I want to remember that I am still that young girl from the playground, who loves grandma’s pies and paints while everybody is asleep.
My work is filled with light and warmth from my childhood, as well as the aroma of my grandma’s kitchen and the flowers from her garden. The cumulation of our memories are based from our past experiences and can dwell in either light or shadow.
My work is just at the intersection of human life and body, abstraction and flowers. I believe there is a strong connection between nature and our sense of place.
Throughout my life I had to deal with light and shadow. To create the work, I have chosen light. Thereby, by the instrumentality of camera and the human objects around me, I exploring the relationship between humans and flowers as a relationship that throws light on the synergetic dynamics of embodied aesthetics.
Abstract
Living in the United States makes me feel isolated from my Russian family and distant from my Russian culture. It’s hard to maintain both American and Russian lifestyles as they are so different. Being far from Russia, I found painting is a meditative process. Remembering the past, I use my paintings to depict small towns and personal activities. Brushes and paints are the supportive material that help me to learn and illustrate my cultural history. My canvas became a portal into the life of my ancestors. The more I hold the brush in my hand, the more I realize how much I have to learn about them.
2. Context
“I am a little Jew of Vitebsk. All that I paint, all that I do, all that I am, is just the little Jew of Vitebsk.” ( Marc Chagall). Being a six years old , my mother took me to Vitebsk, to show me where and how her students life was. Since then, every summer we went to Vitebsk. Firstly, we were visiting most of our family relatives who moved to Vitebsk when my little hometown named Novozybkov been engulfed by The Chernobyl disaster. Secondly, we visited The International Festival of Arts “Slavianski Bazaar in Vitebsk. (also known as Slavic Bazaar, is an annual festival held in Vitebsk, Belarus under the auspices of the Belarusian Government since 1992.).
We always stayed in my uncle’s apartment. He has such a tiny but cozy kitchen where all my family gathers at the family table. I still remember where I was sitting, even if it was long time ago. The countertop was behind me but my eyes were directed to the wall. In the middle of this wall was one painting.
The painting depicted angular green houses and a pink church. My grandmother and grandfather lived in such houses. Until I was eleven years old, I never asked about this painting, I just admired it every summer. Lately, in my art history class, the teacher described the artist Marc Chagall (1887-1985). Since than I recognized the painting from my summer vacations it was “The Walk” (1918). (Fig.1)
Marc Chagall is one of the founders of surrealism and avant-garde in the world of twentieth-century painting. He was Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker, and designer who composed his images based on emotional and poetic associations, rather than on rules of pictorial logic (Foray, Brook 2003).
The art historian Meyer Schapiro once wrote “If we had nothing of Chagall but his Bible, he would be for us a great modern artist.” (Schapiro, 1956). Later, Schapiro added that Chagall was “also a surprising anomaly in the art of an age which otherwise seems so remote from the content and attitude of his work.”
( Fig.1)Marc Chagall
Painting, 1918, 169.6×163.4 cm
The canvas “The Walk” depicts Vitebsk – the artist’s hometown. In the foreground is Chagall himself with his wife. At their feet is a red flowered handkerchief with a glass and a decanter of wine on it. The heroes of the picture are depicted in the midst of a secluded picnic. Marc Chagall stands on the ground, his face shining with sincere joy. He holds a goldfinch in one hand, and holds out the other to Bella. His wife flew off the ground in a burst of absolute happiness. She soars in a cloudless transparent sky, arms outstretched, her pink dress fluttering and fluttering in the wind.
I believe that this work by Mark describes that the love for two is the highest happiness on earth. Even a simple walk can turn into an unforgettable flight over houses, buildings and most important, the church.
It seems to me that Mark Chagall was a very sensitive master of painting. He absorbed the images that he met in childhood into himself, like a sponge. Chagall’s work is unlike the contributions of other artists not simply because of its inclusion of unusual symbols, but more significantly because of its distinctive hybridity and manifested combination of many different influences and identities, often driven by his relationships to members of his social and professional networks. (Reich, 2012)
One of my favorite quote by him that touched my heart : “My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent.”
Pablo Picasso revered Chagall’s imagery, saying, “I don’t know where he gets those images… He must have an angel in his head.”
Couple month ago I received a message with a collection of photos. The message was saying: “you should look at this artist , she reminds me of you, Anastasiia!” It was a message from my close friend. He was in Tallinn in Fotografiska. Fotografiska is a museum experience for the modern world founded in Stockholm in 2010. The website of the museum says that Fotografiska is a destination to discover world-class photography, eclectic programming, elevated dining and surprising new perspectives.
The message included photos of Maisie Cousin works and her exhibition. The exhibition introduced pictures of everyday objects from our domestic environment which have been turned into hallucinatory images.
From the series “Dipping Sauce” (2018) by Maisie Cousins
There were beautiful plants, magnified body parts, very bright colors, crushed fruits, jelly slime, leftover food, which decorated with plastic objects, like a plastic baby in the photos. It was clear that no one can remain indifferent from her compositions. The audience can have either a pleasurable or abhorrent reaction
“There is no need for me to appeal to nice – I’m not making an advert for a perfume! I’m not interested in nice things; I like grossing myself out ” says Cousins
On my second studio one of my teacher introduced to me Philip Guston. By that time, I was working mainly with a pink palette.
When I got back home after the class, I started to explore more about Guston. I can’t explain what I felt when I was looking on his work. It made me laugh at the beginning but suddenly my face changed and I felt so sad inside. Not without reason, in the world news today, emotional calls to action carry, either “ Down with Guston!” or “Give up on Guston”. Guston was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1913, the seventh child of Russian immigrants. A characteristic feature of Guston’s works was that when creating new paintings, he often used fragments of previously created canvases.
Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973. (Fig3)
To my way of thinking, his painting is an encounter between obsession, feelings and image. You can see his melancholy in the color palette that he uses, but the same time, a sense of humor behind in which particles of depression are hidden. This is inherent in talented people. “Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see” -Guston saying.
3. Thesis Project
a. Conceptual Discussion
“Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.” – Hans Christian Andersen. Six years have passed since I flew across the ocean to “another planet”. Perhaps, one day I could write the whole book about my little solitary voyage.
Each person lives his life in different ways, choosing his own path, living according to his values, ideas, listening to the voice of feeling and reason. Life is a test for each of us. Throughout our lives, we gain experience and wisdom. “In order to write about life first you must live it.”– Ernest Hemingway.
During these six years, there were a lot of ups and downs for me. There were many interesting meetings and some of them were fateful rendezvous. There were losses in my life and crazy baffles. Those feelings happen when there is a streak of failures in your life and there is no one close to you. There is no one to hug you. You cannot feel the warmth of your mother’s hands. At such moments, most of all, you begin to understand how far you are from home. The only talk that you can have is a talk with your pillow. In most cases, real and genuine feelings of love are evoked when we are “far from our childhood”, which cause warm, sincere and often nostalgic feelings, only in the lack of such feelings. For many of us that know the real value and beauty of what is inaccessible.
Now I live in another country, distant and alien to my Motherland. I absolutely and completely revised my views and attitude towards my country and traditions, which I have always resisted and never appreciated.
“The most beautiful things in the world must be felt with the heart”- Antoine de Saint Exupery. Every night when my mother put me to bed she read me a Russian folktale.
“Folklore in Russia was born of myths and rituals of tribal forms of society. Folklore is deeply ingrained into Russia’s history. Every culture across the globe has its own set of beliefs, values, and tales that make up the psyche of its people. These tales, which often come in the form of what is considered a folktale or fairytale, give others a look into the lives of those people in a way that is often psychologically intimate and bridges generations” (Perrie,1989).
“Generally speaking , Russian folktales is our cultural traditions on which many beliefs, as well as dances, songs and heroes are based. A common theme throughout most of the folklore was the status of the hero, who was almost always of a lower class than his opponent.” ( Moniz, 2016).
I vividly remember all the fairy tales that my mother read for me. I always liked those fairy tales that ended with the victory of good over evil. I remember that everything happens like in life but not with real people. Animals turn into friends in fairy tales. They talk, they sing and they travel. In fairytales, all objects like flowers and trees blossom forth. There are fairies, genies, sorcerers and all your magics, miracles and desires come true. I remember, before falling asleep, I was dreaming about how I could fly and how my toys would come to life and talk with me.
One of my favorite fairytale was “Riaba the Hen”. A very short version of this story goes as follows: There lived an old man and an old woman, and they had a hen called Ryaba. One day, the hen laid an egg — not a simple egg, but a golden one. The old man tried to break it, but could not, the old woman tried to break it, but could not. A mouse was running by, swayed its tail, the egg fell and broke. The old man is crying, the old woman is crying. “Don’t cry”, says Ryaba the hen, “I’ll lay you a new egg, not a golden egg, but a simple one” (Anonymous, date unknown).
Recently, my mother sent me a photo from my childhood painting
( Figure 4), I think I was around seven years old when I paint this picture. This reaffirms my childhood sweetheart.
Another fairy tale that I remember from childhood is the fairy tale “Kolobok”. It always amused me. A funny story about Kolobok, who ran away from many dangers and was always sure that nothing would happen to him. Kolobok spoke to his companions, sang songs to them and rolled on along the forest stitch until
(Fig5)
he met a fox, which outwitted him in the end. The moral of this tale is the opinion that no matter how smart you think you are, there will always be someone who is ahead of you in cunning and knowledge.
Figure 5 is also my childhood painting, I think I was the same age as in the previous figure. I think this demonstrates again how I was fully involved in “fairytales life” and what an imprint it has on my current work.
Thus, I must admit that being very far from my homeland, the miracles of fairy tales allows me to survive in today’s world. It helps me to believe in miracles and that good triumphs over evil.
All in all, the fairytales of my youth inspire the work as their innocence is my innocence.
b. Description and Process
I must clarify that one of the hardest challenges in my life that I have not overcome is writing about my work. Each of the four paintings ( Figure 6-9) for my thesis projects was created on canvas using acrylic. Each painting is small in scale. Despite the fact that the size of each painting is small, the small size contains the biggest story of my childhood soul. Being far from home and spending most of the time by myself, I always think about being a little girl. More and more, day by day thoughts of my childhood come into my head. Being homesick, all reminiscence come more often and depress me.Struggling every day with myself and trying to avoid mental health issues, I express my recollection on canvas.
First, I speak with my family on the phone, they are giving me the
The first work (Fig.6) shows a very typical Russian house that my grandmother and her parents used to live in. I spent my childhood in their house. We call it Izba which is a traditional Slavic countryside dwelling. It is generally built close to the road and inside a yard, which also encloses a kitchen garden, hay shed and barn within a simple woven stick fence. Izba was always built from wood because a wooden house is a warmer and the microclimate is better than stone.
One of my memories is a smell of Izba. It is hard to describe the smell, especially during the cold winter when people heat the izba with firewood which has been get gathered in the forest.
Everything was done in the village. Everything was made by the people in the village. In Figure 1, I draw the chicken because my grandmother always had twenty chickens. We always had our own chicken meat and eggs. I remember how all chickens walked in my grandmother’s garden. Every time I opened a wicket fence to my grandmother house, the garden was full of chicken, ducks and geese. On the fence there was a clay jug. My grandmother used to dry dishes after serving us milk from a cow that was stored in the jug. The flowers in pots on the windowsill were an integral part of all Russian houses in the villages.
In Figure 6, I show the homemade pie. Cherry pie that was my favorite. I used to climb a tree using the stair that my grandfather made. After gathered cherries, my grandmother cooked the pie. In Figure 6 and Figure 7, I try to show with the pie looked like.
Back to my childhood fairytales. I had a very tiny book which was one of my favorite books. I used to reread it again and again. I don’t remember the name of book, but I remember the plot. The fairytale in the book was also about the cherry pie , that “chickens friend” was trying to share it equally. That book gave me a knowledge of wisdom and taught me much about friendship. The book included a recipe for the pie.
The figure 9 portrayal of the traditional grandmother in Russia which is my grandmother Alexandra Petrovna Kamentseva. Russian women in their seventies like to cover their head with a shawl. Usually, the shawls have a very bright color palette that are full of flowers. The shawls are always made from natural fabrics, such as wool and linen. In the countryside, when the weather is beautiful, grandmothers like to gather on the bench by one of their houses, as all houses in Russia have a bench outside, wearing colorful shawls and debating the news as people pass by.
Figure 6 Anastasiia Iron, Warmth, 2021. Acrylic on canvas.
Figure 7 Anastasiia Iron, Nectar, 2021. Acrylic on canvas.
Figure 8 Anastasiia Iron, Hone Restaurant, 2021. Acrylic on canvas.
Figure 9 Anastasiia Iron, Grandmother, 2021. Acrylic on canvas.
Conclusion
“The first notes I still play when I start a sound check are classical. Those are my roots.”
– Andrew Bird.
Psychologists indicate that once you have learned your family’s history, you can look even deeper into the family tree for psychological and health patterns. Through my art, I explore the daily life of my ancestors and my cultural identity. My colorful drawings and paintings my genealogical tree.
I have never doubted that my roots are my main power and my artistic inspiration.
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