Self-Portrait with a Glimmer of <I>Teplusia</I>
Some lover of aphorism once said that the meaning of any painting lies in its framework. Kyiv painter Olena Yaremchuk can partly confirm this maxim and simultaneously completely disprove it. Most of her paintings presented on April 6 to her friends and acquaintances are decorated with roughly knocked out settings. However, they are far from meaningless. Simultaneously her landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and miniatures, seemingly unsophisticated and in reverse order as a rule, within their creator’s soul, quite cozy in her modest house and green terraces of a spread fantastic for Kyiv descending to two small ponds.
She had to create everything there by herself, practically alone: lay the roof and floor, plaster the walls, move tons of dirt, clean and build the ponds. There also was a lost war against the garage, threatening her house and poisoning everything around. At least, this is how Olena sees it. Recently she found out how little city officials of various ranks and the Greens of various hues want and can do to protect the land and people.
She divides her life into two parts. The first is her house and garden, the second her painting. “This is all dear to me,” she says. “It is like children whom you love equally. But if it is time to water the trees while I’m painting, there is no option: I just go and do it.” Regrettable as it is, this person of the arts makes her living not with her painting but with her orchard and vegetable garden. She does not sell her paintings. Is it possible to sell one’s children? (The painter’s sister lives in Germany. When she learned that Olena was planning an exhibition, she asked whether she was going to sell tickets for it, making Olena laugh on end). Lena is positive that her figurative children, paintings and every living thing in the manor, jealously compete for her attention. “Painting is more delicate; it never covers the blankets over itself, while nature is very active in this respect, and it is quite right,” Olena believes. “It has a dead season, winter, before it, when it calms down. Then there is nothing to rival painting.”
There are many self-portraits among her paintings. “Does it mean that you love yourself above all in the arts?”
“Of course not. I just have to use the cheapest and most obliging model. Besides, what I do in my spare time is mostly self-perception and philosophical self-understanding in various forms. Here I work as a kind of company or assistant to nature. Without self-understanding it is hard to find a common language with other people. To me, nature is both a temple and a studio. In my view, there is so much love in any object in this world. It is this love that we should worship. This is why any of my works becomes a living being, at least to me. What I put in it starts to come back in the form of warmth.”
Olena’s house is heated with a stove she herself made, reminding one in a way of those heating peasant houses. The stove is another object for landscape painting. Through a big embrasure in it one can see a window, behind which are the garden, flower bed, and the pond poisoned with garage sewage but still picturesque. The stove was christened Teplusia [pet name produced from teplo, Ukrainian for warmth]. When its doors are ajar, reflected light of the flame falls upon a self-portrait, which at first sight seems to be poorly placed, since the daylight almost fails to reach it.
