rivers, paranoias, etc.

this is a tail-end of an entry:

And this is where nature and the Road come in. I’ve been settled in this one ‘civilized’ community too long, that is, long enough to start feeling like if I don’t play the game I’ll me brought to shame, or at least to the end of the line each time. That’s why I move, that’s why I listen to the wind and want to shoot that man-dog when it barks at nothing and interrupt the wind. When you move, your chances of turning into a civilized swamp are much lower. Flow like a river, move by, pass though everything, like a spirit, and possess things and people if you can with a dream-passion-demon, if you’re blessed with a good message, possess them as you pass. Play a song, talk to them, smile, tell them about the other side, of where you came from, of where you are going. And go into Nature, flow with it, where the rust of the world can’t get you, cause there you’re made of wood, not iron. There you are open, cause there are no doors or locks or gates. And if you are afraid, the fear cannot spy on you through a key-holes or a fence crack, but it will come and look you in the face, and you either live or it takes you and end of story.

Yet, even this fable turns human, for all rivers can’t flow forever and if you follow the river, you get to the sea. And it is that Sea I flow towards. And streams and sewage pipes come into me, and I join the Niles and the Mississippis and turn into underground trickles and go through bed-rock and burst out a-waterfalling and flow and flow and twist and curl and I dream of the Flood all the while. A joining of all the rivers, swallowing rusty toxic swamps and wiping us all clean and rushing, rushing and foaming, rapidly, then rabidly foaming, and the flood reaches the Ocean.

Infinity, peace, silence, life, Blue Blue peace. The ultimate blues of the Universe – the Infinite Ocean of Life. 

greay is great

a mini-essay prompted by a friend's question about the color...


Gray is a plastic color achieved in pigment by mixing a neutral (neutral - a relatively equal combination of the primaries, which are red, yellow and blue) and a white; in light - by a neutral filter (ex. clouds). Due to its neutral position on the chart, it can respond beautifully - in subtle or dramatic contrasts - to its environment of surrounding colors or lights. 

Often the color grey can go unnoticed, blending into neighboring whites or blacks, whether it be in a shadow or body-color (body-color - the color of an object in stable natural light). But because colors can only be perceived in their relativity to others colors, in nature or human manipulation, when placed next to a saturated color, grey can both augment the color's vividness, and, due to the law of opposite colors (please see a basic color wheel), the greys own tone is accented, thus giving it a slight color 'glow'. This phenomena can be observed during particularly lit cloudy days, during sunsets and an dusk. Artists and fashion designers, and other people sensitive to color, adore a particular combination of a warm ('warm' in color language refers to a noticeable presence of yellow) gray with a pastel pink, and consider it a classic color combination. Joseph Albers, a painter and author of numerous essays, including a book, which now is a color theory classroom staple - "Interaction of Color", has studied and revered gray in his work, though most of his own paintings use primaries. 

In our culture, at times, gray carries with it a stigma of desolation and plainness - the grey of the ash in a burnt-down forrest, of a concrete industrial complex, of a cold rainy day. But with a sensitive application, this color can bring out the potential of others and serve as its own rich colorfield. Since the Industrial Revolution, many artists, architects and designers have fallen in love with gray both as a delicate surprising color and as a symbol of the new industrial beauty. The Bauhaus' revolutionary use of bare concrete along with exposed beams at first shocked the public, used to the beauty of a building be represented by warm wood of the country home, the white marble of Classical Greece, or the gold-leaf friezes of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Now the Bauhaus aesthetic is in the very bloodstream of contemporary architecture and public taste (although we still love our log cabins).  In his early surreal horror-film "Eraserhead", David Lynch sets the story in the concrete labyrinth of industrial L.A. He goes as far as recording the entire film in black and white, in order to give gray full reign.

Please enjoy your day. If the weather forecast favors you so and its overcast and raining, notice how bright those green bushes suddenly look. 

other gray thoughts:

an old woman's grey hair, a hare, the road, storm clouds, dust, wolves, dirty snow, the ocean, ice, rocks, gray eyes, my cat, the brain, everything just before it gets totally dark, moth powder,

in the garden

a dream about hands

Not many were left and the few who were had to watch their back. People wore many faces and often changed their expressions dramatically from a wide smile to a brooding to a confused innocence. Sometimes the change was so quick that between each blink you had a different man stand in front of you in the same body. The colors where both bright as fresh paint and dull and raggy, all at once. It was never quite day and never quite night, the medieval light of northern winter lit the outside, and door and buildings contained different worlds. I was the last singer in the world of cannibals and they needed my hands for business. The hands where the best when they were soft and white and belonged to someone like a singer or a young woman, or both in my case, so that they could be easily liquefied and molded into belts. The unwanted hands were thrown down a deep well-spiral-stair case to the bottom of which no one has ever been. Runaway thoughts and memories fell down this well too, hiding from misuse. They approached me and asked if I could lend my hands for their business, being such a wonderful singer. I agreed, but first, I said, I must take a walk. And I ran as fast as I could toward the well and flew down the stairs and into the darkness, for I knew that with my hands they will take my soul. In the soul-less world, merchants did anything to acquire a soul, for it was worth millions and could power a machine for much longer than any other fuel. I shouted sweetly, trying to conceal my getaway, that I will be right back, I’m just taking a short walk, I shouted up into the darkness, and I felt that they had sent their hounds after me. So I just let my feet tumble and fell. After an eternity of this falling chase I reached the bottom floor, which opened up into a large storage space, blue-gray cement and metal, fluorescent lights and locked doors. I ran through the labyrinth of halls. I didn’t know where I was, touching the doors and running up and down back stairs and elevator shafts. Then I reached the door at the dead end of a hallway that had no handles on the outside, but I opened it, or it opened to me, and I was in, and I knew I made it. This was the ‘afterlife’ ward for singers. In the afterlife they must segregate the males from the females, just like in a hospital or a private religious school, so it was full of women. The whole place looked like a rehabilitation ward, although everyone seemed physically healthy. The hallways were lined with lockers. I was handed a key and a lock and I had to find my locker. Suddenly I was running again and knew that if I didn’t make it in time I wasn’t going to be safe, I wasn’t going to be able to stay here and I would have to go back outside, may be even up and out of the well. With the feeling of being late for the final exam I flew up stairwells and down halls, lined floor to ceiling with small lockers next to which single figures and small groups where calmly conversing and moving things in and out of their lockers. I found my number, quickly opened it and put the bundle of clothes I had in my hand on the bottom shelf. I think it was a cloth hat and a shirt. I also had a bottle of water. I made it in time and stood looking around and catching my breath. A group of women approached me and asked if I wanted to come along.It was time and they saw I was new and they could show me where to go, although it wasn’t too hard, because everyone was going there.  I decided to take the clothes and the water bottle along, just in case, and closed my locker. I was staying here, probably forever, and a deep melancholy overtook me – these were all singers! And I was a painter, I was only a singer up there cause I could sing some, but I was actually a painter and now, surrounded by all these women with their opera statures and singer eyes, I felt a deep longing. Then I realized that to be stuck in a madhouse full of painters for eternity wouldn’t be much better, the melancholy lifted a bit, although my mind was still trembling at the vanishing thoughts of my recent chase, the hounds, the cries, the well, the fluorescent lights, my hands. I had my hands now, everyone here had their hands, and carried notebooks and coffee cups in them. We sat down in a big room, what looked like a cafeteria and a lecture hall at once, and I think we were about to be explained something about our condition. Then I woke up.

letter to emir kusturica written as a facebook message

a poem for nikola

emir kusturica, you live in such a sad and drunken world,
we only dream in nightmares of joining you out there,
we dream, emir,
we dream.
but we are so afraid our heads
will explode if we take them out of the hole,
so instead we say our prayers for you from here,
from our coma,
from our uniformly glowing letters
our white-clicking buttons,
our neon lights of idols
that glow in our eternal night
and we tell the children
it's the sun,
the stars,
the moon.
we lie, emir!
we praise the bards with the golden tongues,
and drink their poison words
and put our fingernail clippings and our first-borns in their jars.
Dress us, O! whitely smiling ones!
dress us in yours sausage casing and pull our muscles tight,
we want to learn every dance in the world,
for we are immortal!
and our soles will never wear - we dance on clouds, emir,
our feet don't touch the ground.
what color is the dirt of your shoes?
Red
like the blood and the setting sun
or black
like the memories of ancient trees and the mouths of the hanged ones?
emir,
we are afraid and we hate each other
but we keep our clenched hands around our own throats
and try to sing.
we dance of clouds, emir.
we dream and dance on clouds.

portfolio for MuralArts

photo from a newpaper article on Huntington Firestation Mural, Boston, MA

http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=17NTSAHC

project partner, Kristie O'Donnell, in front of Huntington Fire Station Mural

detail, Huntington Fire Station Mural

Rindge and Latin High School Mural, Cambridge, MA. The students used Gauguin's painting and questions Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? to explore their own ideas of home and belonging. Each student painted several sections of the mural and contributed a found object of personal importance for the installation on the bottom.

R & L Mural, detail

student working on R & L Mural

R & L Mural, detail

R & L Mural, detail

R & L Mural, detail

Immigrants (Lost and Found), oil

with sculpture professor Batu Siharulidze, discussing mural installation Mother in Gallery 5 at Boston University

suggestion i sent into studio360 to do an episode on 'On the Road'

I am a twenty-three-year-old Belorussian immigrant and  I have been fighting with a disabling feeling of the loss of national identity and the unclear emotions following the event of moving to the States at the age of twelve, for ten years now. Anger at my mother, at the governments, at myself, at art, at anything, really - it's a frantic kind of feeling, like an egg that got dropped out of the nest and went into shock. It's the kind of anger that egg would feel after the shock is over, and it's supposed to fell like a happy little egg 'because this new place is better, so slap on a smile and run along!' I learned fast, but I could not find a sense of peace in the new identity I was supposed to identify with and even though my accent went and my Russian instead got an American accent (which was a traumatic realization brought on by a visit to Belarus after two years out and getting called 'an American), despite my assimilation,  I still felt like an outsider, especially in the subtle matters like humor and childhood memories, that people around me could share, and settle their nostalgia and camaraderie into. It's the intimacy of the cultural identity that I lacked and that lack brought me the most painful confusion. Nevertheless, I managed to get myself a full scholarship to BU and graduated with a double major in painting and sculpture and went along with my life, got a job. But the momentum of my migrant youth didn't let me stay put and I decided to backpack through Europe (again, but for longer this time) and go to the Balkans and see the gypsies and roam and have no home, because I was so sick of having a changing my permanent address, always with a feeling of shame somehow, and of being the undercover outsider, like an unpaid spy. 

But as I was getting ready to leave for the journey... I discovered the Blues and Woody Guthrie, then jazz, and then the whole wide mystical country rolled out before me, like a veil lifted and through the music  I 'got it'. And I left for my journey with a new feeling boiling up inside, the feeling of 'leaving home to go on a journey', but a home that I could come back to, a wild home, and home that was itself homeless, wandering, desperate for greatness, and I can live there, because so was I. And somewhere along my trip I found 'On the Road' online and listened to the whole thing in a gulp and Kerouac opened for me the last floodgate and I finally felt happy to be... well, I have to say it - an American. I am planning many projects based on these new feelings - paintings, murals, documentaries, and I want to talk about home to those who feel like they don't have one, I want to talk about the Blues, about singing,  about storytelling. America is nothing but road, and on the road I found my home.