City as an Artist's Subjectivity

"The music I play is not really the music I would like to play”, my favorite saxophonist Art Pepper once said. The lithograph, which I began to do for the "City" project, was completely different in my idea, but for technical reasons beyond my control, I had to make a compromise, leaving the original scheme, having decorated it with a rainbow of night city advertisements giving hope that everything will be mighty fine in the future, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night will be Saturday night. In "Edichka" Limonov wrote literally the following (I am quoting from memory): The money that old dotards like Dali, Shagal, Miro have from selling their pictures is not enough, to make even more money they put their lithograph masterpieces on sale in thousands of copies. Bearing in mind the financial aspect, I would object to Kharkiv native. You might clench eggs between your legs failing to fry them on a hot stone. Lithography is not just a multiplying technique; the final product has a flavor that can not be achieved with a conventional frying pan. I demonstrated this together with the printer, although I deviated from the original conception."

"Сity is a fertile theme for any artist. And the city I live in is especially good. Here you can find plots to suit any taste: if you want you can paint and draw its grand views of beautiful architecture, rivers, canals, bridges ... Or well courtyards, firewalls, which I have not seen in other cities and towns. And a variety of subjects — on the streets, in cafes, bars. In the title of my graphic sheet I used a quote from an interview with a famous poet, friend of Joseph Brodsky, former Leningrader Yevgeny Rein: “What is a glass of vodka? It liberates the soul ...."

"Sheet from the album “Forms of the Future”, based on the texts of Russian self-taught scientist and visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who recreated a project of an ideal society and city of the future in his books. The left side of the sheet is devoted to selection of ideal city residents for dormitories, the right side is a description of a high-tech house equipped with an autonomous life support system. Rewriting the scientist’s texts by hand, the artist as if reincarnates into him, trying to grasp and hear the cosmic flows that controlled Tsiolkovsky."

"The plasticity idea «form draws form», expressed by Vladimir Sterligov in the late 60s of the last century, is being honed in lithographs. This is an attempt to find inseparable plastic penetrations of depicted forms. An attempt to ensure that one detail of a drawing becomes part of another. Flowing into each other, they should make a strong visual composition. The main task is to create a single graphic organism, when a drawn object gives life to another one. In this case, there is an interpenetration of silhouettes, where the foreground, middle ground, and background become a single whole. Light, transparent drawing, on the one hand, and a found plastic construction, on the other hand, the way I see it, complement each other, making a graphic sheet both airy and convincing."

"I see City as a Spider that moves with us on the web... Spider is one of the oldest symbols between life and death as a "continuous sacrifice", as Schneider well noted. Its threads symbolize the duality of our world, in which Spider is a demiurge that connects the eternal and the finite. In the Upanishads, web thread symbolizes the sacred sound Om. In one of Akutagawas stories, Buddha throws a thread into Hell to a criminal who didnt kill a Spider. Spider is both a God and Executioner, and this makes it similar to City."

"A white sheet of time, on which the sunlit city appears as a relief imprint. Thick golden air with poplar fluff. Time has stood still. House number 29a. Yellow square of the wall. Small square of the window, which is cramped. You are flying away beyond the fence of the Childhood House on the wings of a memory bird. Grass-blade days are woven into a tangle of years that rolls along the road of memory. A unique, vivid image of the home town from the distant childhood, the Home from which you flew away forever. The town of my childhood."