Nina DENYSOVA: “Painting is like preserving nature”
After talking to Nina Denysova, a Kyiv artist whose paintings are occasionally exhibited and rumors about her life cause quite a ripple “in certain circles,” you feel as if you are watching the knitting of some kind of chimerical lace. You think the conversation is over, but another motion of your soul will at once trigger its continuation. Nina is a person who, if working, may say bluntly: “No, no talk or tea, I’m working now.” Nina can talk about everything, and she knows how to choose truly exquisite things. Her house is home to a distinctive individual style. In clothing, interior decoration, and lifestyle alike, she is an absolutely modern, young, and refined woman who will never do anything on the spur of the moment. When the Persona Gallery collected all her new works under the title Neolith, visitors felt they were simultaneously in primordial Ukraine and the civilized world. Those in attendance seemed to show no surprise at her works, in a sense that they treated them as something organic, moder, and typical of themselves and the time we live in. Nina Denysova’s pictures do not make the impression of a challenge, commotion, opposition, avant-garde, or breakthrough. They are, as one lady artist put it, “what Ukraine is coming with into the European space as a part of it.”
I even hate to interrupt this almost embroidered monologue.
“Ms. Denysova, we’ve known you for a long time as a wonderful illustrator of children’s books. There are families which have made unique collections of your books. You illustrated even the best known folk tales in such an unusual way that they seemed to display new meanings. Now we more often see your canvases, even whole series and cycles. Is this connected with the miserable plight of contemporary Ukrainian publishing or something else?”
“A book is a theater full of motion and specialness, in which it is very interesting to work. But it also has something that restrains the artist, for instance, an assigned text. Sometimes you feel like getting into in a situation of intimacy by creating something your own from start to finish. The more so that I failed to fully express in books what I had intended. There were books which I did to my heart’s content, but there also were ones that I had to rework and amend under the pressure of editors. Sometimes I showed guile, trying to outsmart a bureaucrat at the expense of some dimension he was unable to fathom, but still it was a compromise. Now many intelligent editors have emerged who properly treat an artistic vision and do not pressure the artist but, instead, seek his advise, but, for obvious reasons, very few books are now being published.”
“A Japanese author wrote that when a woman gives birth she develops true human courage. I spoke very little in childhood, and when I was painting, my fellow villagers would just freeze, looking at me, sometimes with their mouths open. My facial expression must have been so unusual. Only after childbirth did I change, and when I came to my native village, everyone was surprised: ‘Good Lord, Nina has begun to talk!’ When I was at school, I would get mediocre grades because, coming to the blackboard, I thought I had to say something more clever than was written in the textbook. For example, I loved history very much but I couldn’t tell what I knew in front of the others. This internal censor kept me from stupidities. With age, I really changed and began to say stupid things.”
“A drawing, a painting, or any picture is the most wonderful opportunity for a person to see things. Nothing can take the place of vision, and there really is something religious in this: the eye is by far the first organ forming in the embryo of both man and the tiniest animal. It is thorough the eye that we get most of our information and knowledge of the world, while the unlimited sensation of color, its shades, hues, and combinations, is nothing but striking. Why does a rainbow appear, what is white color? Weightlessness and the absence of light? For when there is white, there is no light, the latter will only appear when blue, red, and yellow colors nestle with white. White is the death of color, this is a nonentity akin to blackness, even though white and black are different concentrations of the same condition of color-mixing. We know from physics it is impossible to split light; man turns out to be unable to grasp its very basics. In other words, the sensation of color and lightness is somewhat mystical and beyond the physical. This is a given larger than man’s physical world. One more thing. Physicists can find out what there was and will be, but physics cannot identify what there is right now. This function, to find out what ‘now’ by combining what was and will be, is being performed by modern art. Artists are called modern precisely because they react to these palpitations of today and the fleeting moment without ignoring the past or the future. In general, I am not a very religious person, I’m a faithful atheist and understand that religious things are larger than I am. I share the art of eleventh century icons, for their language tried to convey simultaneously both movements and feelings, both inner and outer things. In Kyiv, these are the paintings of St. Cyril’s Church: transparency, freedom, and light.”
“I have almost no traditional Christian subjects, but I am going to create a modern icon. The latter has not yet been created not because it is impossible but because nobody sees one. It is not with us. The paradox of today’s eye is that it never catches even the faintest glimpses of an icon. So, when I paint an icon, I am often guided by entirely different laws as though it were neither a traditional well- known icon nor an easy-to-grasp realistic picture. I try to create the sensation of the importance of light, openness, and boldness.”
“I wonder who invented the myth that I am a feminist. Even a phrase was ascribed to me: ‘You should combat men using mystery.’ In fact, I’ve always thought it was violence to separate man from woman. This is why I get shocked by many things written in the traditional feminist literature I’ve read (unfortunately, not so much). For example, such conclusions as: when you apply lipstick you want to be liked by men, or a question like: why don’t you hold an exhibition on March 8 (International Women’s Day — Ed.)? I answer that we want it always. A common attitude toward female nature contains very much profanation, inability to say everything with tact, nicely, interestingly, and to the point. In a rough and male dominated society, culture has also been formed by men, so women cannot so far speak adequately and freely. It was natural that feminism emerged, for the female gender had to be liberated, sooner or later, but what feminism is showing now does not solve the problem by making man the enemy. To raise woman to a higher level, one must liberate males, defending them from our society. For a well-bred man finds life very hard nowadays.
“I was once strolling with a photo camera in hand and I felt like taking a shot of country women selling their wares in marketplaces and underpasses. For this is what is going to disappear soon: in the future life there will be no images of these women with their dignity, wisdom, and simultaneous depression and dullness. But it is also very difficult, in moral terms, to photograph them, as if they were things exotic. They look up at you in a way that you feel ashamed of yourself. Instead, I would love them to begin living and working the way I saw in Germany during my brief stint of advanced studies. A family of two rather elderly persons cultivated almost three hectares of land, doing this easily and without getting too tired. The point is that they work freely, out of desire, not out of dire need. So they have time to take care of themselves, their feelings, and to communicate with nature without laying any blame or rudeness, without tragedies, malice, or insults. We are also certain to have this, aren’t we?”
