Some Art Stuff Between the Cultural and Political Self Evaluation

Truth is this blog was created many years ago for the purpose of sharing my art. I've gone through a phase when I deleted everything on it and completely abandoned the project. I'm working my way back to posting my art faithfully and daily. I'd really like to gain a world audience for my paintings, for what is the purpose of making art if not to share it with others?

While I've been in Russia I started revisiting my old sketches for a story I am particularly fond of by Gogol. The title roughly translates into The Terrible Revenge. When I first read the story I felt a sense of destiny that I should read it, it hit close to my heart and my life experience. It was like a cautionary tale written directly and very specifically to me personally. I was so taken by it that for some reason I sat down and copied the entire thing by hand, and it's a pretty long story! I felt that I really had to make myself memorize it and make sure and remember its significance to me. I also dreamed of illustrating it and have taken some steps to planning the first scene and developing the main villain.

I brought the sketches with me to St. Petersburg simply because they were in my sketchbook. I thought I was going to use my sketchbook to plan my series of matryoshka paintings because that's the what I've been invested in recently in Tucson. But I found it difficult to work on that series in my transient state for it required a lot of precision and calmness of mind, things I don't have right now, as I am away from my husband, reconnecting with my childhood, learning about myself through communication with my grandmother and seeing my country and its culture through new eyes.

I let go of my usual sense of control over my medium and came up with this.