Eugenia Vronskaya NEW
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| June 2008 Interview: Eugenia Vronskaya |
Between The Lines
GEORGINA COBURN talks with Highland-based artist EUGENIA VRONSKAYA
about the evolution of her latest body of work now showing at the
Rebecca Hossack Gallery in London
EUGENIA Vronskaya’s recent work includes the series of
portraits on permanent display in the foyer of Eden Court Theatre. She
will be exhibiting new work at Kilmorack Gallery later this summer.
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GEORGINA COBURN: One of the images that really intrigued me as part of the latest exhibition, Between the Lines,
is your ‘Self-Portrait With My Sons’. It reminded me of Dürer’s
‘Self-Portrait With Fur Coat’, not in any literal way, but because it
seemed to be dealing with the idea of artist as creator. Can you tell
me a bit more about the artistic references in that image and how it
developed?
EUGENIA VRONSKAYA: The whole image began after the Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition last year [How Others See Us],
where we were doing the portraits – I was making self-portraits at the
time, so it was in that mode. The light on the canvas, what I saw in
the reflection of the mirror (there was something I saw in both, on the
canvas and my reflection) instantly prompted me to go at the level of
my head, bang, bang, bang (painting gestures).
If you remember
the self-portrait, the head is very light, it almost has the feeling of
a halo around it. Then the head was left, it was just hanging there on
this white canvas. One day I came up with a drawing of the body to the
head, it all came separate – very fast, very fluid. After I’d done it,
if you remember the pose, it looks like a crucifixion. I didn’t intend
this, it just happened, but I saw it.
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 | | Eugenia Vronskaya - Self Portrait With My Sons (oil on canvas). |
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I
like canvases communicating, it was intended to be direct, to be open,
the gesture of opening palms, it’s disarming. I held my brushes in my
palms and it was drawn in the same way. It had a definite feeling
because of the light and because of the pose, of something you mention
– the creator offering something in that open gesture.
I find most of the world fast asleep with what they call
beautiful – to me it’s as ugly as hell. What I understand as beautiful
is very important to my work. I think there is definitely a question of
beauty coming not from a visual surface but something within
GC: I also thought that having your sons either side of
you was very interesting. As a female artist, it suggests
representation of another aspect of creation. Was that a conscious act?
EV:
Then it became a conscious act. You’re talking about icons as well,
taking down from a cross or any central figure you always have two
characters. If the work is being commissioned for a church, a church
being built in someone’s name or as thanks for the birth of a child,
the people who donated money for that would be painted in the icons.
They would usually be either royals or distinguished figures painted on
both sides of important central figure compositions. So that was not
accidental, I intended to put my sons in there.
I wanted them
to be on my both sides because they are my creation, my inspiration, my
lifeforce. I wanted them to be like my two princes on both sides. All
the other figures were not anywhere to be seen at that time.
GC: How did they emerge?
EV:
I always did copies of the old masters, all the painters I put in are
my all time favourite painters. Rembrandt, Goya and others. Goya’s self
portrait with that fantastic lip – disgust to the world, I wanted that
to be there too. It arrives before you think about it, you want a
message to be sent out but not necessarily through you. Sometimes you
can’t contain all that in your own figurative image. So through
representing who they were, their attitude in the world, it suddenly
just sprang out. I just thought Rembrandt – I love always looking,
copying and painting. It was partly fun and that they contain so much
I’d like to say. How it technically happens I don’t know, I just knew I
wanted them to be in a different dimension. It was about giving a hint.
GC: It puts the self-portrait in a context of ideas historically, by having those artists present.
EV: Yes, it was also like – you know what you do in your sketchbook, or probably when you write, you don’t write a full sentence.
GC: Like a trigger?
EV:
Yes, a reference, and to me that portrait started accidentally, it
carried on and I felt like I was driven all the way through. Every day
I just had a sense of doing that much, then that much and then I
finished the work within the next two or three days. It happened very
fast. I become obsessed with certain colours – the red/purple in the
back, I love that colour, I use it a lot in my paintings. You can do
extraordinary things with it, you can mix it with so many different
things, I like the depth of it.
This particular grey, which is
not black, it’s quite a complex grey, I think it’s stunning how they
break the space, what they do to the space. Part of it was completely
formal, wanting to introduce that colour, breaking the depth of it and
seeing how thick, how thin – that dialogue with the canvas. As I said,
you have ideas with the speed of light going through your head, when
you paint none of the ideas stays in your head, you become empty,
driven by something else.
Once you put down the brushes you
remember you had all those ideas, so they are there before and after,
the rest is obliterated in the world of things. The frightening thing
is when you’re three-quarters there, you like 75% and you don’t know
what to do with the other 25. But then you’re driven, what you imagine
people will see in it and how you imagine they want you to finish it.
That’s where you either make a great painting by not allowing that to
be the overpowering force and still walking your path, or you become an
outside viewer, dragging it to where you think it should arrive. I love
and admire those painters who are always with me in some ghostly
presence, of what they have done in their paintings.
GC: They are part of the ground, the foundation.
EV:
Yes, absolutely and my two sons are the most important creation as a
woman and as an artist, my knowledge, my learning experience, my
reflection in the world – they’re there in the foreground. I don’t find
the piece to be sentimental, I think it can work in a very formal way
too.
GC: Yes, it interested me because it brought in elements I hadn’t seen in your self-portraiture before.
EV:
No, I hadn’t seen it either. The last strong self-portrait was
“Self-Portrait As A Man”. I found being a single mother bringing up two
boys I wanted to provoke that side – that I am a mother and a father
and what is it like in the art world as well if you are a man, it’s
very different. I’m not a feminist, I’m not a sexist – its nothing to
do with that, it’s not to do with gender or politics.
GC:
Yes, that painting had nothing to do with gender and everything to do
with creativity, that’s why the latest self-portrait is so interesting.
EV: I also like the way it
works formally. I like what’s happening with the light. When you say
light people think – light that shines from the left through the window
illuminates one side. I think of light within a painting (and a very
dark painting can have extraordinary light), the whole way I try to
handle the paint – I want to express the light within the painting, not
light from the right or left.
GC: It’s not about physical light, but a different concept of physicality.
EV: Yes, that’s right.
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 | | Eugenia Vronskaya - My Altar No3 (oil on Canvas). |
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GC:
How does this relate to your early training as an icon painter in
Russia? Does that relate to how you view objects and the physical world?
EV:
Yes, it is like when you learn to ride a bicycle, something you learn
and know very early, it becomes part of your being. In icon painting
they were very clever. On the ground of the icon, which would be done
with fish glue, whitening and charcoal, they used to put silver or gold
plate underneath and then painted with crystal, pigment made from
stone. Crystal reflects light so when it is painted on the gold or
silver reflective surface the whole icon is luminescent, particularly
with a candle placed underneath. Unless you know how it is done you
don’t know why it has that effect and the whole way the faces are
formed and shaped is very interesting because it is a two dimensional
space.
The 11th century iconography created by Grigorie Palama
was designed specifically to draw you away from the physical body and
physical understanding of the flesh. However it had a very
four-dimensional sensation, an incredible sense of light. The point of
perspective in icons is behind your (the viewer’s) back. The icon is
not complete without the person in front of it, the viewer. It includes
you.
GC: It’s a shame that more contemporary art can’t heed that lesson.
EV:
I know. Because I’ve learnt it so early it is part of my thinking and
awareness. It’s not that I go to every painting thinking I am going to
create back perspective or I’m going to create light, it is always
there. It is part of the reason why I like confronting central images.
To me it is always a dialogue, something you respond to. Iconography is
so deeply mixed up, it is probably one of my biggest influences but it
doesn’t manifest in copying.
GC: No it manifests in
how you actually handle the paint, particularly in the “still lives”,
that whole dance of light as part of the fabric of the work.
EV:
Yes. I’m not copying or reproducing the reality of the light coming
from outside or whatever for you to come and see it on my canvas, I’m
looking with light within.
GC: An eye, heart, mind connection, rather than a trick of the light.
EV:
Yes. Once you think that way you look around and that’s what I believe
about attitude – in Islam, for example, one of the most important
things is intention. What is your intention? Before you have done good
or bad. I also believe that about painting, what you want out of it.
The whole icon painting training was so early and so deeply ingrained
what I expect of the image by the end, and out of the whole process is
not a reproduction of reality or not just my internal torment, it is
something to do with bringing up that image, to a dimension which has
become separate. Like Rilke said – it claims its own niche of
existence.
GC: Is that how the “Altar” works function as part of this latest show? You described them as a platform.
EV:
Yes. In the altar pieces I have made it formal. I have created that
table, that platform or environment where I wanted things to happen
which is beyond the repetition of doing the same thing. I hope that
outside viewers are not bored, I am never bored. Within that structure
of the sameness the most extraordinary things happen and they are
everlasting. There is not a single day when you walk in and see the
same thing, it is always different, and it’s very subtle.
GC: Subtle colour-wise as well.
EV:
Colour, light, slightly different angle and compositionally, all those
things I want to explore. I wanted not to go and find everyday a new
still life with bottles, I want to come back to the same thing over and
over again.
GC: For one to inform the other as part of that process.
EV:
Yes. On one hand there is the danger you become very familiar with that
and it’s a challenge to keep seeing what you are doing.
GC: Is that the greatest challenge in making images?
EV: I think it’s the great challenge in life.
GC: Not resting on the familiar?
EV:
Yes. I think it’s very difficult and I’m not saying that lightly at
all. I always think of Morandi, he painted the same things over and
over but I love them, none of them are the same. The subtlety in his
tones and light; very slowly they progress and are distilled to a pure
essence, some of them where the object disappears, it’s hardly there.
He never got bored with those things, I don’t find it boring. It is all
so connected, life and painting. The two processes are closely linked.
It
is extraordinary to find out having my own children that actually
children don’t like excitements everyday, they don’t like unexpected
everyday. They like routine and grounding. When you’re younger you want
to explore and bounce off the ceiling and everywhere, go in hundreds of
different directions, which is fine, particularly if you’ve got lots of
energy, but a time comes when you find that aspect that you’re
interested in or really want to explore and that’s where I want to have
my “altar”. I want to have a platform for more than just visual
excitement. I want to move deeper into the same.
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 | | Eugenia Vronskaya - Red Dress (oil on canvas). |
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GC: Also to create a space where the audience can do that too, they can be lead into a work.
EV:
Well I hope so, it’s always so tricky. I remember painting the altar
pieces and at one point my studio was filled with “grey” paintings. It
was winter and grey outside, people were walking in and going – too
much grey! It is subjective, sure. It frightens me that people will be
put off by not seeing how many more multitudes of colours are in the
grey. I hope there will be a few people who will appreciate that. I
don’t expect my paintings to be universally applauded and liked and if
I did I probably wouldn’t paint them. Some people put it to me “Why
can’t you do something with jazzy colours?” Jazzy colours – what are
they?
GC: Another very interesting set of images in
this latest body of work is the midpoint between thresholds, can you
tell me a bit more about those images?
EV: I always look for this edge of being uncomfortable. My intention in the work is to create that edge.
GC: A psychological aspect to the interior? It’s never just an interior, just like it’s never just a still life?
EV:
Yes, that’s what I’m interested in in the hallway. I want to create a
space, an overall feeling of what you might experience inside. Subject
matter is not hugely important. Painting-wise I find these things
incredibly stimulating, I look at them and I want to grab a brush. I
like objects that don’t necessarily go together, I like their oddness
and taken out of context. Making you feel within, quite idyllic and
simple and then stretched to the limit.
I don’t want you to
find out why you feel that way that quickly. I want people to stand in
front of a painting and think why does it make me feel so
uncomfortable? And yet be drawn to it. It is a double-edge between
being attracted and stretched, what I call strange beauty,
uncomfortable beauty. I also want it to be pleasing in some way too.
GC: How important is beauty in your work, then?
EV:
It depends on what you think beauty is. I find most of the world fast
asleep with what they call beautiful – to me it’s as ugly as hell. What
I understand as beautiful is very important to my work. I think there
is definitely a question of beauty coming not from a visual surface but
something within. So you look at the surface, you see what not you see
but what’s beyond. It is a fusion of thoughts and emotional things
provoking a dance through the visual. It’s a paradox, what you see and
what you experience. Mind, heart, eye all come together.
GC:
Currently a lot of other art forms or disciplines are dominant in
contemporary art. It is actually quite revolutionary to be a painter.
What sort of need do you think painting fulfils for you as an artist?
EV:
As an artist I have always said to people when I’ve taught, if you can
go and do something else – go and do something else. It is like a curse
and a blessing. It never lets you rest. I think you are either an
artist or you’re not. You can be skilful and make money and treat is as
a job, lots of people do that, fair enough.
I find it never
leaves me. When I don’t paint I am like a fish out of water. The world
doesn’t make sense to me. If you are truly committed to the quest of
what you do it is a very hard thing in our day and age. We want instant
gratification, everything is disposable. The painting has a moment but
it also has eternity. With a self-portrait you don’t paint that moment
when you look like this, you paint you. I think that’s what is so
precious, that painting can contain that wholeness in time.
GC:
We have talked about technique alone being a hollow thing on its own.
How has academic training in Moscow and London informed your
development as an artist?
EV:
I went to a fantastic school in the University of Moscow which was
created by people like Kandinsky, Malevich, Larionov, Neblikev,
Khlebnikov, Pinchorova, Goncharova. They were people who looked at all
arts brought together, 3D, photography, cinematography, painting,
architecture, so the object was never viewed out of context. We always
drew the model, the still life within the space, within the context. It
was never viewed as just figurative, just abstract. The elements of
both plastic arts and art understanding of space was brought from all
dimensions. I am very lucky I was trained that way.
GC: I think here our entire approach to art is compartmentalised.
EV:
Completely. The teaching here is so chaotic, picked from all different
directions from the wrong shelves. A lot of it was we would be left to
sit down and do it and prove your point. You are taught very early how
to draw a mark, going to art school at age 11, 12, 13 you are at the
age and time to allow you to do that. By the time I matured I had the
technical skill and then life experience bit by bit, I am still
learning.
GC: It is a more holistic approach to art and painting, but also finding your own path.
EV:
Definitely. It is like writing a book without knowing the alphabet. You
have to know how to put letters together in order to make a word. I
never feel in my work that technically I can’t do it. However if you
don’t have the internal understanding, if you don’t know how the form
works it will always be flat and empty in the presentation. As my old
tutor said to me: when you draw the model stand up yourself, close your
eyes and imagine what is happening inside the body, physical,
emotional, everything. Imagine, and then do it. It doesn’t matter what
technology you have, it’s not going to do that for you. If you believe
that we are all energy, painting is that kind of thing – you either
create a true energy, compact, immense which talks to you over
centuries, or nothing.
GC: So is it about distillation of truth then?
EV: Yes, of course it is.
GC: What other art forms have influenced your practice?
EV:
I am a very visual person. I love looking. When I lived in London I
used to go to Riverside Studios and they would be showing three or four
films by the same director, sandwiches, and I would be sitting in the
front row watching these enormous paintings moving, moving. I love
films. When I’m looking in magazines I always tear off images that
attract me, some images just filter through and some stay with me. It
is often the trigger of ideas. The thought process and emotional
combination of things lives in a dormant form inside you and then you
see something and it is like a rush of particles, and then you try to
pull it out. It hits a different stage with the painting and then it
hits another stage and so on. It is within yourself. We are selective.
What you are you look for the manifestation of.
GC: How has living in the north of Scotland affected your process as an artist?
EV:
I didn’t hop on a train and consciously move away, it just happened.
Now I can’t even remotely imagine working in a great big, loud city
simply because the distractions are so penetrating. They go into your
pores and into your bloodstream before you know it. I think you would
be pulled apart by so many different forces. I find the moments when I
really work, I would work in the studio overnight when everything goes
to sleep, when everything disappears I find that’s the moment when I
can hear my strange inner voice.
GC: Devotional stillness, that kind of feeling?
EV:
It is. It’s a strange kind of feeling, to remove yourself, distil
yourself. Get rid of all the clutter, until you retreat into this
strange space where you are the only person who knows how this space
works. Sometimes it doesn’t happen, you walk into the studio and you
have too little time or are in a different state, you know you’re only
half way and have to juggle that. The times when you can really retreat
into this space from where you can begin, then you operate with the
tools, imagery, knowledge and sensations which are just to do with
painting. That’s when it happens.
GC: The instruments are sharper too in that context.
EV:
Exactly. Then everything is happening but those two worlds, they don’t
connect. I think that’s why I have always had that division – war and
peace, spaces of warm and cold. The whole world is created in pairs, in
opposites. Day and night, the moon and the sun, man and woman. You
always have that division.
GC: Is that also manifest in the way that accidental and discipline combine in what you do?
EV:
I call it “accidentally deliberate”. Definitely, definitely, and I
don’t separate them. You put all your intentions which are deliberate
into it. Painting is my absolute tool of learning and knowing about
life. You strive to make the best painting and you have to keep going
because you never do. It is a wonderful despair, as Jean Paul Sartre
said – fail, fail again, fail better. That’s what you do. Inwardly you
grow, but you have the heart of a child. I love Louise Bourgeois, her
best work aged 90, her work is superb. I understand what she means;
inwardly you grow, but you have the heart of a child because you become
aware of this immense stretch of knowledge and not knowing.
GC:
And you accept not knowing, accept that there is mystery in what you do
and in life in general. You don’t deny that but actually engage with it.
EV: Yes that’s true, there is acceptance which comes with it, which is such an extraordinary quality.
GC: And hard won, I think, for most artists.
EV:
Acceptance is very important. It is submission but not in a
contemporary sense, it actually means inner peace. It is more to do
with acquiring peace within yourself. It is not about giving up, it’s
the opposite actually.
GC: What aspects of your work do you feel have expanded through the creation of this latest body of work?
EV:
I hope I am beginning to get closer to the point where I am moving away
from subject matter. In some ways the subject matter is intensified but
reaching the point where it becomes nameless, closer to the abstract
meaning. They have stopped being just jars, acquiring a new status in
the world of objects and in the painting they become more abstract
rather than more subject orientated.
It is just the beginning
of that molecular step which I hope will progress further so it becomes
more formal. Its not that the jars are terribly important, but they
become almost abstract, they are this body of jars, this something else
which is moving to a different stage. I hope that in some of the
paintings this happens.
I don’t know what’s next. Work is the
only way I know. When I stop painting I have hundreds of ideas and I
know that they are very dangerous and very empty until you actually put
it onto canvas and start working- and then the whole thing changes. I
am always driven by the process itself. This body of work felt like a
little more of a step towards that fourth dimension.
GC: It certainly feels like that in terms of how things have evolved stylistically.
EV:
I want the work to become simpler and simpler, I almost want the viewer
to look at it and not always see anything. I want it to be very little,
but I don’t want to be pretentious – I don’t want to place a tiny
little jar in the middle of a huge canvas, that doesn’t interest me.
I’m not interested in being clever, I want to arrive at that work
through the process of painting itself.
GC: So it is more about the relationships.
EV: Yes.
GC: The one you have with the canvas, and the one that the audience has with the work ultimately.
EV:
Yes absolutely. That is the honesty I want to be driven by even if I am
last century, even if I am not doing something that contemporary art is
meant to be doing. I think the world is no better than 20,000 years
ago. With all our so-called civilisation, knowledge and progress, have
we actually progressed? I think we are who we are. So I don’t think I
should conform, to the new understanding of what contemporary art
should be.
The truth, the true meaning of things around us, is
not in the multitude of choices but within a more focused range and in
that way I am happy to be isolated. In fact I want to be even more
isolated because I don’t find that all this information and exposure to
it is actually doing a lot of good. Even though we evolve and change
there is the truth deep down and you don’t need to achieve it by
travelling the world in the most noisy places with jazzy colours!
Between The Lines by Eugenia Vronskaya is at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery in London until 28 June 2008.
© Georgina Coburn, 2008
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| June 2008 Editorial |
Winners and Losers
Posted by Commissioning Editor, Kenny Mathieson, on
Sun, 01 Jun 2008 08:00:00 GMT |
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