We Stand With Ukraine – Art Show and Fundraiser

Mark’s Garage Art Gallery, February 24, 5:30 – 8 PM. 1159 Nuuanu Ave., Honolulu, HI

My two friends and I are organizing this art exhibition to commemorate a one-year anniversary of the unjust war that Putin started against Ukraine on February 24, 2022. We are holding a public reception at

Mark’s Garage Art Gallery on February 24 at 5:30 till 8 PM.

Please, come and bring your friends. We will be donating some portions of proceeds of art sold to charities supporting Ukraine. Location of the show – Mark’s Garage Art Gallery, 1159 Nuuanu Ave., Honolulu, HI
Duration of the show: 02/24 – 03/02, 2023

Show Description

This exhibit’s goal is to raise community awareness of the unjust war that Russia started against Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

We are three artists from Russia and Ukraine. Born in Soviet Union, we came to the US as professionals, and recently met in Hawaii at the Mark Brown’s group Plein Air Painters of Oahu.

This exhibit of our original fine art represents our personal reflections on the war. With different styles of painting, we express our feelings about this horrific conflict. We hope to raise the awareness of the war in the community, and to show that Russians and Ukrainians can work together for peace.

We are also hoping to raise money that will be donated to the selected charities and our families and friends currently suffering from the war.

Marina Borovok
www.beachbreakart.com
Marina holds a Ph.D. in Biology and an M.S. in Education from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. “I truly believe in the vital role of Arts in the Society. Imagination doesn’t have limits. Be free to express yourself in any kind of artistic form. Enjoy your creativity, and appreciate any creation by others.” Marina teachers Art Classes at the Downtown Art Center Honolulu, Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam and on-line via ZOOM.

Inessa Love
@aumakua_board_art
Inessa holds a MA and PhD in Economics and works as a Professor at UH. She has found art as therapy while going through a divorce. Since then she immersed herself in studying art at UH and with Mark Brown. She loves experimenting with a mix of impressionism, tonalism, and mystical realism. She is captivated by the beauty of Hawaii and loves to paint local landscapes. She is also a surfer and one of her passion projects is painting surfboards. For Inessa, both painting and surfing are meditative experiences during which time stands still and nothing else matters.

Alla Parsons
www.allaparsons.com
Alla holds BFA in Painting from Minnesota State University Moorhead and MFA in 2D studio Art form Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA. “I draw and paint portraits, landscapes, figure and still life. All for the sake of eventually re-working these in my imagination and creating what I call my main work – Magic Realism. My work is about the mystery of everyday life. It is about my life, my personal history, and my family heritage.” Alla teaches art at Hawaii Pacific University and Downtown Art Center in Honolulu.

FUNDRAISING: Our Selected Charities and Funds Recipients:

United Help Ukraine
https://unitedhelpukraine.org/

Your gift today will provide medical and humanitarian support, as well as the critically important non-lethal resources the Ukrainian defense needs to drive back the invading forces and protect innocent lives.

Peace Engineers in Ukraine

Certified trainers in Nonviolent Communication are working with police, military, government officials and many more, training them in NVC and educating Peace Engineers who intervene in conflicts and support peaceful solutions where ever possible.

Ukraine from the inside – NVC and the war

Please, feel free to share this announcement and invite friends!

Aloha!

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Plein Air Painting and Raku Ceramics Show

As I mentioned earlier, today is First Friday. If you are not familiar with this term – it is a day when all galleries in downtown (in many towns) are open and have something on display, and also there are some refreshments, such as cheese and grapes, and sometimes some wine.

The latter, not the wine, but cheese and grapes part, was a major argument when we were teaching our students to attend such events.

If you are familiar with First Friday events, and attended them in the past – no matter what city you live in, and no matter if it is a First Friday, or a Second Friday, or a Last Friday, or whatever – you will be happy that such events are coming back. Since COVID and lockdown started in 2020, we all were longing for such events, when artists are gathering together, when cheese and wine are in abundance and laughter and art go together hand in hand.

These events are coming back, as well as our freedom to travel and live our lives and I hope this progress will continue.

So, here! Please, come to the First Friday event in Chinatown Honolulu if you are around. If not, I am sorry, but hope you enjoy some photos I have taken while hanging my work.

The address of the new Downtown Art Center is: 1041 Nuuanu Ave, Honolulu. Exhibition is on the 2nd floor.

I promise I will take more photos at the event today, especially since I forgot to take photos of all my works while installation was in progress. But here are a few:

N1:

Composition with a Tree. Oil on canvas. 12″x12″.

This painting was done on plein air in Ho’omaluhia Botanical Gardens

N2:

Water-n-Rocks. Oil on Canvas. 9″x12′.

This painting was done on plein air at Makapu’u Beach

Now I have to show the photo of how it is hanging on the gallery wall. I was really excited how these two paintings fit with the raku ceramics. The ceramics artists was helping me to hang my pieces, and she was also really excited about the fact that our work was WORKING together!

We discussed the fact that we both use natural Hawaiian colors in our work – blue/green of the sky and water, browns of the trees and rocks. You can see my excited face here:

My excited face with N2 and N3 paintings plus Raku Ceramics.

And here is a photo showing you are truly beautiful space of this gallery:

Yes, as you can see on this photo – I have a special shoe on one foot – it was a foot surgery. Nothing serious, and I am recovering now.

The tree painting below N 4 was done in Foster Botanical garden in Honolulu. It is very special tree – it was presented to Mary Foster and it is a direct descendant of that very tree under which Siddhartha Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment in the sixth century B.C. I was very curious about this story and here is what I found: The story of how this tree appeared in Honolulu

This is a link to the video of how my tree painting looks with the ceramics in the gallery. I just give you a link to my instagram page since I want you to follow me there! I am not sure if you see it in the video very well, but the ceramics pieces not only match with the colors of my painting. They are also meditative ceramic lamps that glow with a soft flickering light. I think there cannot be a better match with my Buddha Tree painting!

This is all for now! I am very excited and happy and proud to be in this show!

Aloha to all of you, and I hope some of you can come to see the show in person!

Aloha!

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Self-Portrait in the Red Turban

I am going to publish a story about each painting that means a lot to me. Self-Portrait in the Red Turban is probably number one in this category.

Self-Portrait in the Red Turban

I always wanted to be an artist.  My grandmother gave me a book from which I taught myself to draw when I was five.  Then at the age of thirteen I enrolled in a four-year course of study at an Art School which held classes after the regular secondary school day ended.  There is a great system of art and music schools that still exists in Russia.  After the end of my regular school I would run to my second – art – school every day to study art history, painting, drawing, sculpture and composition.  I was unaware that in the rest of the world Abstract Expressionism was the mainstream. In my world the mainstream was Rembrandt, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, all the “Old Masters”.

I can say that I had a classical training in art.  The “Old Masters” were considered to be “gods of the past”, however, the present day “masters” had to create in the style of “social realism” to be approved by the ruling Communist Party. That was not too exciting. In addition, one day someone said to me that “there had never been any great women artists”.

At first, I tried to argue but I had no facts to prove the opposite.  During that time in Russia no one knew about Artemisia Gentileschi, Georgia O’Keefe, or Lee Miller.  In the meanwhile Linda Nochlin’s 1971 article, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”was published in the United States.  It is ironic that the same words that empowered women artists in the United States made me give up my dream of becoming an artist in the USSR. As I observed that all “great artists” of both present and the past were men, especially those who chose to join the Communist Party, I also heard negative remarks about “women’s art” which was often considered unimportant and limited to flowers and such. That was very discouraging for me as a young person and the desire to become a professional artist was suppressed by the time to apply to college.

Drawing always remained my way to express my emotions and feelings.  I drew to express myself and it made my life more bearable.  But I gave up on the idea of becoming a “professional” artist because I did not want to be a mediocre artist.  Mediocrity as an artist seemed to be predetermined just by the fact that I was a female.  I became a “shadow artist”.

I learned the term “shadow artist” much later, while living in the US and reading Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.  “Shadow Artist”, according to Cameron, is a person whose “inner artist” or “artist within” was suppressed for a number of reasons. Such people do not believe they can be “real artists”.  They love art, try to be around artists, sometimes they become models, muses, or supporters of artists.  Sometimes they marry artists. Cameron did not go so far in her book as to state that being a “shadow artist” is much more typical for women than for men, but that seems to be the case.

When I moved to the US in 2001 my life changed. I was greatly encouraged and supported by my loving husband and started becoming a “professional artist”, getting my degree in art, coming out of a “shadow”. The more I learned about female artists the more interested I became in “women issues” in art. One of my favorite artists, Katherine Ace, once said that as a woman she should be careful about what she chooses to paint.  She said: “painting flowers is politically dangerous for a female artist, playing right into cultural stereotypes. It sets you up to be dismissed“.  But she painted flowers anyway, as well as other subjects.

Self-representation, like painting flowers, risks being stereotyped as “feminine.”  Many of my works are based on some form of self-representation.  Even if use models, I still often identify myself with the models, their life stories and feelings. I believe, that engaging with self-representation places me within the mainstream of contemporary female artists who took themselves as subjects.

In her study of female surrealist artists W. Chadwick characterized them with: “the affinity for the structures of fabulist narrative, and a tendency towards the phantasmic and oneiric.” Other qualities shared by female surrealist artists, according to Chadwick, include embrace of doubling, masking, and masquerade as defenses against fears of non-identity. Chadwick pointed out the following representational strategies that continue to resonate in the works of female surrealists:

• Self as Other;
• Self as Body;
• Self as Masquerade or Absence.

Many women adopted practices of “self-othering” – identifying with moments prior to historical time and/or outside the civilized cultural spaces identified with patriarchy.  Chadwick sees these categories as broad frames “within which it is possible to enact dialogs between contemporary women artists and Surrealism.” You can see fabulist narrative, phantasmic and oneiric qualities in some of my work. One example is identifying myself with Van Eyck in Self-Portrait in the Red Turban.

I represent myself in this painting as “Other” and as a male.  This is my way of reflecting on my role as a woman artist in contemporary art world which still treats women artists differently than male.

The crows included in this work are connected with my childhood memories and experience with my mother’s pet crow. It combines my feelings of bitterness of rejection. Once at the age 4 while being rejected by a crow (see the full story in this post), and then again, at the age 14 being rejected by the Art World when I was told “there had never been great women artists.”  The images of the crows in this work symbolize great artists whom I admired and wanted to belong to their world but was not allowed. This work is a statement that I do belong to the Art World.  I state this by wearing Van Eyck’s famous red turban and the coat with crow’s feathers.  This connects me to the Art World as well as to the Crows’ World.

This painting is very important to me, so when it was sold after my MFA thesis show, I felt that I had to make another one. That is why there are two version of it:

2011   

and 2013:

www.allaparsons.com

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Pigs, Bitches and Cows

With what is going on the political scene right now it is especially important to hear voices of such artists as Deborah Rockman. Her drawings “refer to a cultural linguistic practice that objectifies and dehumanizes women by selectively positioning them in the animal realm, over which man considers himself to have authority. Women are reduced to isolated fragments of the self and filtered through a misogynistic male gaze. Women are critiqued, labeled and deemed sexually desirable or not based on their body type, their genitalia, their facial proportions, their scent, their leg length, their passivity or assertiveness, all of which are crudely paralleled, through language, with animals.”

See Deborah Rockman’s website here.

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What is Conceptual Art?

This article just appeared on Artsy.net and I would like to share. It is an interesting collection of facts, including a note by John Baldessari that “conceptual art wasn’t about art that had a concept, but about interrogating the concept of art”. Apparently that is what J.B. does himself – interrogates the concept of art. Here is the article link: If-you-don-t-understand-conceptual-art-it-s-not-your-fault.

Isaac Kaplan is the author of this article. I do not quite understand why he says: “Conceptual art—…—emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to Clement Greenberg’s militant commitment to formalism”. In my opinion, Conceptual art emerged with Marcel Duchamp’s concepts and ideas and his urinal “The Fountain” in 1917. Not necessarily my favorite type of art, but I just like more certainty with dates and facts, probably the result of my first career path in history.

I am personally bored when I see that type of art in museums… But, anyway, it is worth putting a bookmark on this article and reading it later, especially if you are trying to figure out what is wrong with our Art World.

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Joseph Vodlan

It’s always great to meet and get to know new artists, especially if their art is interesting to you! Here is the link to his website: http://www.vodlanstudios.com
A very interesting and versatile artist, he had an Open Studio today. Originally from Slovenia, he moved to USA … a long time ago… First to New York, but now he lives in Waxhaw, NC. It was a wonderful studio visit, great and inspiring art! Thank you, Joseph for inviting into your space!

 

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What is Magic Realism?

When I was in grad school I had to study my own art and artistic process and write a thesis about it. It was then that I discovered the niche where my art belongs in the Art World – a style called Magic Realism.

The term “Magic Realism” was first used by Franz Roh in his book, Nach-expressionismus (Post-Expressionism) written in 1925.  He later used the same term in 1968 in his new book German Art in the 20th Century.  He also called this new development in art “The New Objectivity” (F. Roh, German Art in the 20th Century. Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968, 112.) By using the term Magic Realism Roh is referring to Post-Expressionistic artwork in which some mystery or secret seems to be hidden within the subject matter.  As opposed to Expressionism, “Magic Realism emphasizes the object and the everyday life in new and unfamiliar ways.  Juxtapositions of sharply rendered and detailed elements, both in the foreground and back ground, are used to develop an air of mystery or ambiguity.  They remind us that there are still many mysteries in life.”  http://www.tendreams.org/magic-art.htm

Roh used the following dichotomies to highlight the differences between Expressionism and Magic Realism:

Expressionism:	Magic Realism:
Ecstatic subjects Rhythmical Extravagant Dynamic Loud Close-up view Monumental Thick color texture Rough Emphasis on the visibility of the painting process Centrifugal Expressive deformation	Sober objects Representational Puristically severe Static Quiet Close and far view Miniature Thin paint surface Smooth Effacement of the painting process Centripetal External purification of the object (Roch. 113)

I found more similarities with my artwork among the attributes of Magic Realism than Expressionism.  I believe that my style developed more towards representational, quiet, static images in painting, turning daily life into eerie form, with a thin paint surface, although I experimented with the opposite qualities as well, never finding much satisfaction in them. Some of my works are more surrealistic (Caged and If I Could Have Opened My Heart), while others (In the Room With Memories or In the Room With the Magic Ball) can be referred to as Magic Realism.

In the Room With Memories

In the Room With the Magic Ball

If I Could Have Opened My Heart

Caged

In Art History, Magic Realism acted as a portal to Surrealism, and many artists shifted back and forth from one to another, especially Magritte (Roch, 138).  When I discovered the website ww.tendreams.org  I found a few artists there who I knew before and considered them as influences, but did not realize that they belonged to the Magic Realism group, among them Andrew Wyeth, George Tooker and Charles Scheeler. These artists sometimes crossed the boundaries between Surrealism, Symbolism and Magic Realism. My work also shifts back and forth across the boundaries of Surrealism and Magic Realism, while a large number of other works as you can see on my website www.allaparsons.com are just studies from life: Figure, Still Life and Landscape. I feel the need to work on these Life Studies and I am constantly working to improve my skills in observational drawing and painting. However I consider Magic Realism my major work which takes a longer time to go through the process in my mind, before ripening and appearing, first on sketchbook pages and then on canvas.

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William Cumming

I just stumbled upon an interesting article about William Cummings. He expressed ideas similar to mine:

“There is only art. Every single human being is born containing an artist, and this being invents art for itself at around the age of three when, without any teaching or coaching or indoctrination, it invents shape.”

He believed firmly that training in “so-called commercial art” is superior to university art schools because students develop skills that allow them to survive in the world, to understand how the art world operates, and to handle the financial end of working as an artist. “Fine art is a war,” he said. “I hate fine art with all its fuss and crap. Fine art students are brought up in a spirit of contempt for people. Of course I paint for the market. So did Rembrandt. So did Titian. It’s high time we quit compartmentalizing art, and leave graduating students thinking they need a grant to make a living.”

William Cumming My Dog

He taught his students, “You have a right to make money out of art. To make money out of art, you have to create art which someone wants to buy. It’s okay if your drawing is crude. That’s how nature meant it to be. The question is how do you turn crude into a marketable commodity.”

This is something that I would say to my students too. I wanted to share this with you. See the entire article at: http://www.historylink.org

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Dear friends! Please, come to the opening of my exhibition “Magic Realism”.

The reception will be on Friday, March 21 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History. The address of the Museum is: 975 Main Street, Danville, VA. Phone (434) 793-5644.

The exhibition will last till May 25.
The reception is free and open to public.

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Explanation of a painting: My Mother’s Life. Part 1. (in English and Russian)

 

The image in the center is a watercolor painting made from a photo of my mother I took when we visited the University of Virginia in 2004. After that the idea was born to use this portrait for a bigger painting and add small scenes on the edges. This idea was influenced by the structure of Russian icons where the main image of a Saint is in the center and the smaller images “klejma” are located on the sides, illustrating the Saint’s life.  So, in “My Mother’s Life” her portrait is surrounded by the most important scenes of her life. I conducted a series of interviews with my mother clarifying which events in her life she considered the most important. Some of the events she considered the most important I used in the painting. For example, one is “the birth of her first child, the son” (let me note that it was not me). Some of the events I had to add by myself based on my understanding of what was important in her life. Some of the small images are based on real life photos and some are “invented”  – based on my imagination, but also based on real facts of my mother’s life.

First in the series of small images (top, left) is the detail of a real photograph. My mother is sitting on a chair, she is maybe 2 or 3 years old and her face looks angry. My mother told me she felt angry and unhappy when they took her photo, because she had to pose in an old coat. She inherited that coat from her older brother, as he did from somebody else. She felt that the coat was very old and ugly and she felt terrible that she had her photo taken in such an ugly coat. She later told me about her  thought process: <<Why did we always say in school “Thank you to the Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!” while in fact I am not that happy – I have such an old coat?>>. That moment I depicted in this first image and that’s why there is a text there in Russian, translated as “Thank you to the Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!”

Центральный портрет был написан с фото которое было сделано в Америке, на территории университета Вирджинии, когда мама приезжала в 2004 году.  Я решила использовать это фото для портрета, но потом родилась идея – дополнить портрет сценами из ее жизни, заимствуя идею Русских Икон. В “житийных” иконах в центре всегда стоит большой образ святого, а вокруг – маленькие картинки – “клейма” с изображениями жития святых. Так и в “Жизни Мой Мамы” ее жизнь – наиболее значтельные сцены – по краям в маленьких картинках. С мамой были проведены небольшие интервью, проливающие свет на те части ее жизни, которые она считала наиболее важными. И кое-что было принято во внимание. Так, например, одно из наиболее важных событий в ее жизни было “рождение первого ребенка, сына” (примечание, я не была ни первым ребенком, ни сыном). Но некоторые важные события в жизни были определены мною, по моему собственному усмотрению. Некоторые “картинки из жизни” были прямые заимствования из существующих фотографий, а некоторые – были “изобретенными фотографиями” и я изобразила некоторые моменты просто из воображения.

Первая картинка – это прямое заимствование старой фотографии. Мама маленькая, ей года 2 или 3, она сидит на стуле и лицо ее очень сердитое. По ее словам, она помнит, что была очень недовольна фактом, что ее фотографируют, а она сидит в старом пальто. Пальто ей досталось от старших братьев, а им – еще от кого-то. Она действительно очень страдала от осознания уродливости этого старого пальто, и в те моменты ее маленькую детскую голову пришла мысль – <а почему в школе мы всегда говорим “Спасибо Товарищу Сталину за наше счастливое детство!” ? Когда на самом деле я себя совсем не чувствую счастливой и у меня таkое старое пальто?>. Это я и изобразила. В нижней части – текст  “Спасибо Товарищу Сталину за наше счастливое детство!”

Продолжение

Part 2

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