A Valentine Painting

Tea Family This is the most fairytale, domestic and a very personal collection. The Prototypes of pictorial images in this series are real tea pots, each of which keeps its own family history, even an inmost secret sometimes. The collection is linked to a family tea drinking tradition, which in Armenian families quite often turns into a generously served table with homemade jam and fresh bake. Most of my ‘models’ are porcelain items from granny’s sideboard and a chest of drawers hiding trousseau within. In my paintings recognizable classic models of a famous Meissen manufacture, Riga Kuznetsov porcelain factory, Dulev’s factory and St. Petersburg Imperial porcelain factory move through most unexpected metamorphoses, fabulous and symbolical at the same time. This is the quintessence of childish memories and associations, each fragment of which sticks in memory and creates a entire mosaic of my pictures. Some exclusive patterns and colour combinations travel from painting to painting, slightly changing and increasing in numbers. These bright items of everyday life are from our old flat in a picturesque pre-revolution house. Visual images are stuffed with tastes and aromas from my childhood such as granny’s bake, smells of the old house with pantry, maiden room, spacious bathroom with round windows and incredibly high ceilings. Grandfather loved beautiful life. Exquisite things, light porcelain with handmade design, embroidered tablecloths, solid furniture. Old secretaire, comfortable and practical, crammed with cunning shelves and secret compartments, cozy antique armchairs, which still serve faithfully in the modern interior of my home. The most expressive details of these things got so clearly imprinted in a candid memory of a child, that keep on living in my paintings as decorative motifs unattached to any particular daily object. They mutate and transform into new images, and sometimes detach themselves absolutely from original prototypes. For example, design on a handle of antique silver Caucasian dagger may turn into a woman’s mirror, a pattern from hammered vase may migrate onto a teapot or a cup of futuristic form while images from old books often flicker in my portrait sketches. Love to heavy and richly decorated books also started here in this house. Drinking horn (my grandfather had a whole collection of them, including items with the owner’s initials) in my paintings turns into cornucopia, adorning the plane of a ritual table. Lace in the paintings reminds openwork napkins, which my aunt loved crocheting so much. Those piercingly white handmade exquisite cobwebs nobly stand out against the background of dark lacquered furniture. The grandfather loved large pot-bellied samovars, my collection «Russian tea in Italian kitchen» grew out of this love, since in all other daily life choices my grandmother most obviously preferred Italian items and grandfather tried not to argue with that active and overbearing Caucasian woman. «How difficult it is to find a mate», «She has boiled», «He has boiled», «A Valentine», “Tea Family”, “Tower and Brioches”. In some of my paintings I deliberately allow myself - through a jocular title of the painting too – self-irony, even sarcasm at times, thus anticipating and nullifying disagreements of a sophisticated opponent with cartoon coloristic, kitsch and «sweet» themes. Viewer understands that artist had humorously beaten his reproaches beforehand and accepts an open dialogue. Thus, the collection of my tea pots stopped being purely domestic. Students, friends, customers with pleasure replenish my collection with their family heirloom, discoveries made in antique shops or with unusual and at times even design modern relics. This way there appeared in my pictorial collection masterpieces of Soviet design, natively Russian, modern Italian, traditional German, Japanese, Chinese and even national Latvian tea pots keeping in their warm malleable clay mass the warmth of hands of their creator.