Popa Karantino Painting

I live in a constant search. ​ In 2003 after graduating my art studies in the university, I started working with a technique that incorporates body embedding on canvas. The idea of imprinting myself, painting with my body, was created out of a desire to rebel against the classic painting techniques. A desire to eliminate the work of my skilled hand, holding the paintbrush, to delete years of rigid, uncompromising Russian technical learning. At that time, my mind was occupied by my children's happiness and the gap between my childhood in the USSR and the childhood of my own children, growing up in Israel. In 2014 after my third child was born, my art focused on the woman's body, from the cruel point of view of her own eyes, looking through lenses of criticism and self-hatred. As part of my research on obesity, I did a series of body shots, bursting out of them into a series of works called "Fat Bella". Since 2016 I have been writing a short story blog, telling humorous, autobiographical stories - memories of the Soviet Union or stories of my life in Israel as an immigrant, as a mother, whose children pronounce her name with a heavy Israeli accent. Each story is accompanied by an illustration. The illustrations are done on pages, taken from an old children’s book, written by Gianni Rodari, which I received as a gift for my eighth birthday. At that stage of my life, I still believed in communism, and "knew where I belonged" Rodari was an Italian communist, author of children’s books, whose works glorified communism, and were part of the brainwashing that every child in Soviet Russia underwent. On the torn pages from Rodari’s book, I paint my new life and my old memories. There, on the torn, delicate and fragile page, is the connection between past and present, a mixture of words and color. In 2018 "place" became the main theme of my art. As an immigrant, for years I have been searching for the place (some physical space), home or land to which I belong. I hoped that after 22 years in Israel, I would feel less detached, more attached, but reality has proven otherwise. I am still an immigrant, seeking her identity, and the place I belong to exists only in my paintings. Since 2018 I've been working on a series of paintings called 'Place'. I build my new art on the foundations of my past, leaving behind the rigid Russian education, abandoning the years of painting studies in Soviet Moscow.