What is Cheburashka thinking about? Painting

Art “(…) is a very human way of making your life nicer. The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.”, Kurt Vonnegut once said. Art allows me to arrange the reality in my own, uncompromised way. For me, art is a kind of answer to my various needs, however it is not the answer itself. It is rather a continuous question and a comment on times we live in. I associate many functions with art: emotional, communicative, sometimes purely esthetic, therapeutical and particularly important for me, cognitive and descriptive. I feel the need of self expression and creation and art fully enables me both. When I paint, what undoubtedly fascinates me is the color, the matter, the process of creation. Painting is the most familiar way of expression for me, the one through which I can fully and most naturally express myself. Interesting, that painting is a kind of sublimation of motives, loose ideas, faces, landscapes and images you have seen somewhere before. It’s as when I am asked if I know what my mother looks like. Of course I know. What does my dad look like? I can recognize him easily. So can I my sister. But when I am asked to paint them exactly the way I can remember them, I am unable to do that. And when I recall them in my mind, I can see their faces through particular photos, pictures, portraits taken or painted. We have this tendency of remembering through images of great sharpness, with smallest details. Painting also gives such opportunity, an opportunity of both very complex and very individual remembering. Maybe this is the magic of painting that fascinates me so much.