I dedicate these modest notes to my dear unforgettable mother Rita, who with all the presence of her life inspired me to modest achievements in art and was for me a constant feast of life. Natalia Koshelkova June–July 2013

Autobiographical Notes

Birth and Childhood I was born on 4 February 1946 in the city of Leningrad. I was planned by my parents at the time of the Soviet Union’s victory of Nazi Germany, in early May 1945, and so I am a child of the Victory.

I never knew my father, as he died in the first months after my birth.

So I was brought up by my mother and grandmother. We lived in a very small, 15-square-metre room. It lay off a long corridor where there were around forty other rooms housing other families. That was what was known as the communal corridor system in a four-storey house full of such rooms and families. Each corridor had two public toilets, men’s and women’s, and one big kitchen with several gas-stoves and one sink with only cold water.

Before the war my mother and grandmother had lived in a beautiful apartment. It was hit by a bomb during the siege. All their property was burnt. With much difficulty Grandma and Mama found a few valuables among the ashes and moved in with relatives temporarily. Later the state proposed that they move to that small room with the corridor system where I was born and lived until the age of eighteen, when Mama was given a cosy apartment in the centre of Leningrad through her work. It was then that I got my own separate room and a bathtub with hot water.

From early childhood I spent most of my time at home with my grandmother. She had a beautiful voice. Often she sang Russian songs, including romances, and sometimes operatic arias too. Grandma taught me how to listen to, love and understand music. And music became an important element in my life.

But most of all from a young age I loved to draw. Mama worked an awful lot, but on her days off she often took me around museums, mainly the Russian Museum and the Hermitage. So from early childhood I had the opportunity to get to know paintings by Russian and European artists in some of the largest museums in Russia.

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Mama would often take me to the theatre as well. So even as a child I saw lots of ballets and heard lots of operas in Leningrad’s finest theatres. For a week after one of those outings my drawings would be inspired by what I had seen in the museum or theatre.

Holidays Public holidays were special occasions in my life.

When we celebrated Victory Day, the radio would always broadcast Dmitry Shostakovich’s Festive Overture or Alexander Borodin’s Second Symphony, known as the Bogatyr Symphony, or Alexander Glazunov’s ballet music. Through that beautiful music life became filled with hopes and expectation of some beautiful future.

The streets of Leningrad were decorated with bright lights and flags. Mama liked to take me to the city centre and we strolled along elegant Nevsky Prospekt and along the Neva embankment, where large festive ships were anchored in the river with sparkling bright lights and pennants.

After those strolls Mama and I would return home to our humble little room. Grandma would put sweet yeast bread with almonds and raisins that she had had just baked on the table. Then we sat for a long time drinking tea and listening to the festive music on the radio, or else Mama put on a record of some opera music or Italian songs and Russian romances.

Those were happy days for me. Ever since I was always fond of drawing public holidays, the decorated streets, people with balloons and little flags, and the glittering lights of ships on the Neva or the River Fontanka.

Family birthdays were special festive days.

Despite our family’s difficult housing conditions and very modest financial means, on birthdays we always had a lot of guests. There were my childhood friends, friends of Mama and Grandma, many of them from their own childhoods, and, of course, relatives. Everyone stayed sitting round the table for a long time chatting and singing. Sometimes Mama carried the gramophone and records out of our little room into the corridor and then our communal neighbours joined the celebrations, dancing and having fun.

Later, when Mama got the large apartment through her work, she bought a concert grand piano and Grandma often played on it and sang. And those moments were also holidays in my life.

Mama herself was a very festive person, in love with life, and she was able to always create a festive atmosphere around her. Mama’s talent for being present and constantly involved in my life was always a holiday for me. Later, thanks to such festive elements, the concert theme appeared in my work, the Family series, and the Holidays cycle arose.

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Starting to Learn to Draw When I turned seven, Grandma started to take me to a drawing group at the Lenin District House of Pioneers and Schoolchildren on Yegorov Street, not far from the Technological Institute metro station. At the same time I began learning the ’cello, but sadly not for long, because I showed more keenness for drawing.

My teacher in that drawing group was Victor Innokentyevich Plotnikov. I later found out that he also taught the history of the arts at the Leningrad Academy of Arts.

At the drawing group I first learnt from my teacher that a person’s head doesn’t grow from their shoulders, but is held up on their neck. I learnt how branches join on to the trunk of a tree. And I got some idea of light and shade in a painting. I went to that drawing group until I was 13. Those lessons gave me a natural grounding for entering art college.

Mama helped me to choose which one – the Demidov College, as it was known. She had a simple explanation for her choice: “Where there’s less bohemianism.” Besides that, the Demidov College gave good training in the art of teaching drawing, technical drawing and painting. There I would have the opportunity to acquire a good profession, and therefore work, by the time I was 18.

In 1959, when I was in my 7th year at school, Mama and I went to the art college on its open day. There we got to know one of the teachers – Gleb Ivanovich Orlovsky. He looked at the works I had brought with me and offered his help in preparing me for the entrance exam. So for the whole of my seventh school year I travelled to the college each week for a meeting with Gleb Ivanovich. At the end of my year of lessons, Mama and I brought him a big bouquet of flowers. Mama kept trying to pay for my lessons, but Gleb Ivanovich categorically refused to take money and only accepted the flowers. He was a man of exceptional qualities of mind and refinement. Meeting him was a great stroke of fortune in my life. Afterwards, when I had entered the art college, Gleb Ivanovich was my teacher in the drawing and watercolour technique group for the first two years.

Student Years I finally passed the exams and at the end of August 1960 was enrolled as a student of the Leningrad Demidov College of Graphic Art and Teacher Training. The curriculum was very intensive. Besides learning general school subjects, each day I had no fewer than four hours of drawing, painting and composition lessons.

The compulsory courses also included modelling, the history of the arts, the study of typefaces and also three-dimensional draughtsmanship.

In the first two years I mainly mastered watercolour technique, while in the third and fourth I began learning to paint in oils.

The genres that we studied were the still life, portrait and landscape. Particular attention was devoted to composition. 3

We painted portraits from a live model.

For the first two years we did the head and shoulders, then a half-length with the arms, and in the third and fourth years we studied the whole figure full-length, seated or standing in various poses with various twists of the body. Sometimes we were asked to spend 40 hours capturing a model in oils or in pencil.

Before such lengthy exercises we made a lot of sketches in pencil, sanguine or charcoal.

At the end of each year of college we had summer plein-air practice, usually in June.

The task for our summer practical work was to produce a true-to-life depiction of a subject in natural conditions, i.e. in the open air, with light and air playing an active role. In this plein-air work we learned to paint a landscape or a figure in a landscape in oils or watercolour.

At the end of June 1964, after four years of studies at the college, I was awarded a diploma giving me the title “Teacher of Drawing and Technical Drawing”.

At 18 years old I already had a proper profession: I could earn my own keep and, of course, help Mama to enlarge our modest family budget.

By September 1964 I had a job in a school, where I began teaching drawing and technical drawing to the senior pupils in years 7 to 10.

Mama advised me not to rest on my laurels, but to continue my training at an institute. A family council decided it would be best if I tried to get into the architecture faculty of the construction engineering institute. Besides architecture, painting and drawing, students there learnt a lot of mathematical subjects, and I had always been very fond of maths.

And in August 1964 I did get into the architecture faculty of the Leningrad Construction Engineering Institute, as a student of the evening course. Lessons at the institute lasted from 5 in the evening till 11 at night. I would come home around midnight each day.

I did not find the lessons easy. The architecture faculty of the Construction Engineering Institute was one of the most difficult.

I also continued to take lessons in drawing and painting in the art department. My art teacher was Vasily Vasilyevich Ushakov, an interesting artist and a very nice person.

My lecturer in architectural design was Vladimir Semionovich Antoshchenkov, an outstanding teacher and inventor, not only in the sphere of architecture, but in many other fields of life too. He and his wife, the theatrical designer Galina Yevgrafova, would become close friends of my family.

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At the same time as I was studying at the institute, I was still teaching drawing and technical drawing to senior pupils of an ordinary school in the mornings.

After two years on the evening course of the architecture faculty, I transferred to the daytime course and began attending the institute in the mornings. Life became more pleasant and my studies more interesting and easier.

I left my school job and started to teach drawing and painting in the evenings at the Vyborg District Schoolchildren’s Palace of Culture.

Besides my wages there, I got a grant at the institute and that money was greatly needed in our family budget.

Finally, in January 1971, I graduated from the institute, got my diploma and started working as an architect in an architectural design organization.

The Start of My Creative Career In the summer of 1971 I took unpaid leave as I had been invited to join in an artists’ tour around Vologda Region. The trip had been organized by the graphic art section of the Leningrad Artists’ Union. This journey around some of the holy places of Russia was an honour as well as being interesting. We visited the Ferapontov Monastery, where I saw for the first time with my own eyes frescoes by Dionysius, and also many other sacred spots, such as the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery on the shore of Lake Siverskoye. The trip lasted two months and its final stage was a “report exhibition” held in the local art museum in Vologda. Each artist, including me, presented a number of works produced during the two months of that wonderful trip.

A commission made up of many eminent artists from Leningrad and Moscow came for the opening of the exhibition.

Among them was a professor of the Leningrad Academy of Arts, Academician Yevsei Yevseyevich Moiseyenko. He particularly noted my works in the pencil and watercolour technique and on Professor Moiseyenko’s recommendation in 1971 I became a member of the youth section of the Leningrad branch of the USSR Artists’ Union.

In the autumn of 1971 I took part in the Autumn Exhibition of Leningrad Artists and so my career as a creative artist began.

Cheliuskinskaya. Starting to Work in a Complex Printing Technique. Before perestroika the USSR Artists’ Union owned a large number of different “Artists’ Houses of Creativity” across the whole country.

One of those Houses of Creativity was the Cheliuskinskaya dacha outside Moscow, on the road to Yaroslavl. 5

It possessed some splendid graphic art workshops. In 1973 I was invited to that House of Creativity. It was there, at Cheliuskinskaya, that I made my first acquaintance with lithography and etching and from that time I began experimenting steadily in those techniques. In Leningrad the graphic art workshops were located in the House of Artists on Pesochnaya Embankment. A few times a week I would make the journey there and work with colour lithography on pieces of limestone. I generally used the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. With those, by laying one colour over another I could produce a multicoloured composition. White appeared of itself in the gap between the shapes.

That is how the Leningrad and Rural Cycle series appeared. Those works are devoted to the theme of love, the festive occasion and the joy of labour.

A Trip down the Volga In 1975 I was fortunate enough to be invited to make a creative trip on the Volga. Our group of 20–25 people was composed of artists from various parts of the Soviet Union.

We sailed from Moscow to Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). We stopped in that city and for about 10 days travelled around the Gorky Region.

There I visited the little town of Semionov and the village of Khokhloma, where I found out how wooden spoons are made, carved and painted.

There I even managed to live for a time in the home of an old couple who carved spoons right in front of me out of wood brought from the forest and dried.

It was there that I had the idea of producing a little book for children showing how a painted wooden spoon is made, from the very start of the process to the end.

Later, in 1988, that book was brought out by the Malysh publishing house in Moscow.

From Gorky our group took a steamer further downriver towards Astrakhan, where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. In the course of the journey we made brief stops in old cities on the Volga, such as Kazan, Kuibyshev (now Samara) and Saratov. There we sketched and visited the art museums.

After reaching Astrakhan we stopped for a short while in the city itself, visiting the old kremlin, and then we travelled around the surrounding fishing communities. There I saw for the first time how the fishermen catch the huge fish – sturgeon, beluga and starred sturgeon, how they cut them open, extract the caviar, wash it and send it to the factory. While our group was living in the fishing community, the fishermen fed us exclusively on black caviar and fish. There simply were no other foods in the place.

There I produced the watercolour compositions Journey down the Volga, Catching Fish and Dressing Fish and later produced a series of Volga lithographs. The journey down the Volga, especially life in the fishing community, stayed in my mind for a long time.

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After the trip, a “report exhibition” reflecting impressions of the journey down the Volga was held in the exhibition halls of the Leningrad branch of the Artists’ Union.

I was given a recommendation for membership of the graphic art section of the Leningrad Artists’ Union. I became a member of the section in 1976, something of which I am still very proud.

My Teaching Work In that same year, 1976, I organized a group of especially gifted children. Some of them were aged only four or five and I taught them over a period of 10–12 years. Many went on to higher education and became prominent artists, architects and art historians – Anya Zhukova, Sveta Alam and Nana Zhvitiashvili, to name just three. They are all still very dear to me and live in my heart.

The main thing that I taught my pupils was to look and see the world around us, nature, people, animals; to take pleasure in all the beautiful things that surround us; to find delight and surprise in very simple things – that a cow has four legs, for example, and not two or six. Only excitement and surprise from what we see in life gives artists the opportunity to create a beautiful work of art that can thrill people, make them sad or happy.

Of course, in order to produce something like that you have to have certain craft skills and experience of working in art. And to achieve that you need persistence, patience and years of training.

It all begins with the family, in a child’s early years, with the parents’ desire to encourage and inspire their children to be able to overcome the difficulties they encounter while learning and in life generally. My role as teacher lay in developing the children’s skills and capabilities and in maintaining contact with their parents.

My mother did not have any talent for drawing, but from early childhood she taught me to look and see the beauty of the world around and learnt together with me. Mama always encouraged me in all my positive undertakings and inspired me to my modest achievements in art.

Here I would like to recall a poem written by Osip Mandelstam in Voronezh in March 1937, in which he expresses his attitude to creative work:

I say this as a sketch and in a whisper for it is not yet time: the game of unaccountable heaven is achieved with experience and sweat.

And under purgatory’s temporary sky we often forget that the happy repository of heaven is a lifelong house that you can carry everywhere.

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The Countryside A special theme within my art is my life in the countryside. I have always loved the Russian village and I had the happy opportunity to live almost every year in Kostroma Region, right in the back of beyond, on the bank of a rural forest stream.

My impressions of my life in the country found reflection in three series of colour lithographs – Haymaking, Harvesting and By the Well, and also a large number of pictures made with coloured or ordinary pencil and watercolour, such as We’re Going to the Bathhouse, Vegetable Plots in the Village of Serednevo, A Family at Dinner and Sunflowers.

Polenovo In the summer of 1983 I visited the Polenovo country estate museum outside Moscow.

I was invited by friends from Moscow – the artist Vladimir Iliushchenko, his wife, the art-historian Galina Zagianskaya, and their son, Kirill. They had long been friendly with the family of the outstanding Russian artist Vasily Polenov and they spent each summer in a special little house on the estate, where Polenov had once lived and worked and where an attractive white-stone church had been built at his expense. I was lucky enough to get to live on the grounds of the museum, in that same little house on the bank of the River Oka. I spent the whole summer there and witnessed the golden autumn that Polenov depicted so beautifully in his paintings.

In Polenovo I painted a whole series of watercolour landscapes devoted to places associated with Polenov and I shall always be grateful to my artist friends for that invitation.

The White Sea In 1985 I went on a very interesting two-month creative trip around the Kola Peninsula with a group of artists from across the Soviet Union. We visited the city of Murmansk and also the town of Kandalaksha and a few other places on the shore of the cold northern White Sea. It was summer time. I experienced for the first time what the polar day means, when the sun never goes below the horizon and night is as bright as day. It was the first time in my life that I saw so many cranberries, which were growing on the mossy shores near the White Sea. Everything around was red with those berries. The rugged countryside of the North absolutely stunned me. The impressions of this trip led to my Northern Cycle, created in coloured pencil, pen and watercolour, and later to a lithographic cycle on the theme of the North.

A Trip to the USA and Significant Encounters in 1988 And Schubert on the water, and Mozart in the uproar of the birds, and Goethe whistling on the winding path, and Hamlet, thinking with fearful steps, all felt the crowd’s pulse and believed the crowd. Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips 8

the leaves whirled round in treelessness, and those to whom we dedicate our life’s experience before experience acquired their traits.

Osip Mandelstam

In 1988 I visited America for the first time, having been invited by American friends. That trip was very significant in my life because I met some absolutely wonderful people there.

Once, after a long day spent in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, I dropped into the nearest Orthodox church, on 93rd Street. The service ended and I found myself in conversation with a priest with bright kindly eyes wearing monastic clothing. That was Bishop Hilarion, who is now the Metropolitan of Eastern America and New York and First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. He spoke with me very warmly and at great length. From that day on I went to the service in the church on 93rd Street almost every day and I would become very friendly with His Eminence. He was a civilized, educated man with a very kind heart. God grant him good health, now in the lofty position of Metropolitan.

At the Bishop’s request, his secretary, Mila, arranged tickets to performances at the Metropolitan Opera for me. That is how I first came to be in that world-famous theatre. Bishop Hilarion also arranged for me to visit Jordanville, the Orthodox Church’s main centre in America. I stayed there for about a week in the monastery guesthouse and acquainted myself with the sights of the place.

Through Bishop Hilarion, I met another person who became special in my life. That was Archbishop Antony. Our meeting took place in that same church on 93rd Street in New York, during the Feast of the Transfiguration. Archbishop Antony had come specially from California to lead the service. During the festive meal he talked with me for a long time. Those long conversations went on the whole of the week that Archbishop Antony spent in New York. Before his departure the Archbishop invited me to visit the church on Fountain Avenue in Los Angeles. He lived in his monastic cell by that church and sometimes led the service on special feast days.

When I arrived in Los Angeles and visited the church, Archbishop Antony invited me to work for a time in the Russian school attached to it. So I practically lived at the Russian School on Fountain Avenue for two months, the whole of September and October 1988. The Archbishop often talked to me and showed me many religious books that back then had not been published in Russia.

He was a man with special knowledge and profound education, who had experienced and suffered much along with his family in the revolutionary years of the early 20th century. He was forced to flee abroad with his father, brothers and sisters. First to Europe, where Antony received an excellent education and, at the tender age of 18, took monastic vows. Later the family moved on to America.

Archbishop Antony died in 1995, at the age of 95. Until the last year of his life I corresponded with him and we occasionally spoke on the telephone.

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My meetings with that remarkable man and our conversations had a great influence on my subsequent spiritual and artistic development.

Studying Icon-Painting and Creative Visits to Monasteries and Convents In November 1988 I joined the icon-painting class operating under the auspices of the Theological Seminary at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Leningrad, where I learnt now to paint icons using egg tempera. Later I started to travel to Russian monasteries and convents, holy sites that were at that time beginning an active revival. In those places I also continued to study icon-painting.

In May 1990, I visited Estonia, where I stayed at the Russian Orthodox Pühtitsa Convent. There I painted the countenances of angels. There too my ecclesiastical cycle of watercolours entitled Pühtitsa appeared.

From July to November 1990 I lived at the Trinity-St Sergius Monastery at Zagorsk (Sergiyev Posad) outside Moscow. There I made pictures of almost all the churches within the monastery. One of the works that I did there – The Church of the Holy Spirit – was included in the exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris the following year. That work in the simple coloured pencil technique was a great success with the Parisians.

During my time in the Moscow area, I visited the old Russian town of Kolomna. Today church bells ring out everywhere in Kolomna, but back then, in August 1990, the wrecked monasteries were only just starting to be restored and to receive pilgrims. The majority of churches in Kolomna were well preserved on the outside and I managed to produce a series of watercolours there: The Churches and Monasteries of Kolomna in 1990. So my spiritual formation gradually continued through the feast of creative work and through contact with people with particularly high spiritual organization.

France, Britain, America Again In 1991, from late July to September, I lived in Paris, where I was fortunate enough to be invited as one of a group of ten Leningrad artists. We were asked by our friends and colleagues, Parisian artists who had already visited us in Leningrad with exhibitions of their works. They also arranged an exhibition of our work in Paris that was held in the Grand Palais from early August to early September.

I already mentioned this exhibition that included such works of mine as Cyclists, I Don’t Want War, The Church of the Holy Spirit and View of the River Fontanka with Self-Portrait and Dog. All those works measured 80 × 60 cm and were done in coloured pencil, pen and watercolour.

The Parisian artists gave us a very warm cordial welcome and the memories of that trip still live on in my heart.

In the autumn of that same year, I was invited to Britain to teach drawing and painting at a school in Shropshire and also at a special prestigious art school for girls in Brighton. I was in England the whole of September and then went home to Leningrad.

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That same autumn I was invited to California. And from 1992 up to the present I have lived mainly in California, teaching drawing and painting to children and adults. In that period I have painted a large number of Californian landscapes in watercolour, oils and acrylics. The state’s countryside is amazing for its special beauty, immense sky and very warm climate.

A special event in my creative life in California was a personal exhibition dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the birth of Pushkin. It was held on the premises of the California Central Art Council in Tuolumne County from 6 June to 6 August 1999. The exhibition featured around 150 of my works. They were pieces from my Russian period in a variety of techniques and also watercolour and oil paintings that I had made in California. The fact that the exhibition took place at the time of the jubilee of Russia’s great national poet remains a great honour for me.

On Art and Its Exalted Purpose The art of painting, and also of music, has the advantage that it does not require the additional learning of a language of words. One needs only to understand the language of the painting itself and the language of the music itself, that is to say, the language of colour and sounds.

Through the art of music and painting it is possible to avert war between people of different cultures and ethnicities. Because an understanding of the beautiful supplants the desire for aggression. And may art forever create goodness and supplant aggressive thoughts and bring peace throughout the world!

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