ONENESS Print

In 2013 I wrote this poem: I cry for you Something inside me My hidden me My dreams, my hopes I am so lost I cannot find you And will I ever? No one knows I turn in circles I walk in darkness I weep in sleep I cannot breathe How did this happen? I was just trying To make my life Be worth something I long for love For peace inside me For something true, A quiet mind I scream from Loneliness surrounding me From losing sense Of everything I cry for you Something inside me I pray to find you Once again I long for sunrise In my soul I look for truth Inside myself I wrote this in my tiny, charming apartment on rue Charlot in Paris. I was 30 years old and I’d been living in Paris for eight years since leaving Russia. I had been pursuing a career as an actress and despite my natural gift in this, I was not getting anywhere at all, to the point of mysticism. So, I stopped. I already felt the impulse to paint, only I was very scared! I had never drawn or painted and considered myself at the level of a 5year-old. Back in 2012, I had a vision of what would be "The City Where There Is No You", but I only dared paint it in 2014, following the loss of a dear friend. My trip to the art store left me dumbfounded. How could one afford this passion?! One little tube of oil was extremely expensive for someone who can barely make ends meet. Brushes scared me as I had never used one. Also, after seeing the prices - and realising that you definitely need several of them - I left the store with two tubes of black oil paint and a canvas. Fingers will be my brush! And so it was, for many years! I fell in love with oil paint! I remember that first sensation and how liberating it was. Joy from painting would be followed by hours and hours of scrubbing my hands and body of oil paint, using only soap and water as I didn’t know any better! My desire to do body prints came from somewhere deep inside me and my very first piece of art was a blue gouache body print. I had to do a blue body print, I just had to, and I hadn’t even heard of Yves Klein at the time! In those days I worked as a waitress and occasionally I was fired for one ridiculous reason or another. Before finding a new place to work, I would give myself several days of just ‘being’, and those were the days I immersed myself in painting. On days like these "Sleeping at the Origin of the World" was born.