Larissa Naumova. Speaking of myself…….
When we are next to a giant wood fire, we constantly feel the burning glow and the smoldering ash. If we stand next to a sliding glacier, we experience the presence of a bitter cold. If you live on an even and flat piece of land, that doesn’t mean you’re not on a round planet.
The permanent feeling of being consciously present in this world is an important part of my life. In the Orthodox Church, between the altar and the faithful, there is the king’s door in the Ikonostase with the thin veil; they shape the symbol of the boundary between the invisible world, that of the Heights and our world, that of the Valleys.
The basic idea behind my work is to approach as close as possible that veil and what is behind it. I am convinced that in every event and in every human being in this world there is a divine sense and plan hidden. It is now a question of the extent to which man is aware of this and moves towards that divine design itself that has been laid down in him.
For me as an artist, the plastic-visual realization of that thought means standing in the flow of tradition. I try to answer the eternal questions of color, line, light and shadow. Limiting myself in this way, I try to solve on the canvas the question of light as a divine category of time or that of color as a category of the spatial and bring it to a solution. In my paintings I see in the moments of my search for theme and composition. Signs of a universe, which is born of chaos during the torments of the creative process.
I oppose all effects on the canvas as long as they are not justified by the assignment. I am not heading towards wanting to create forms through hyper-realistic effects, collages or by using social or political allusions. That is the field of placard art and journalism. Other than that, I honestly feel like a classic painter. Today in art we find a lot of ‘portraits’ of the evil and many that resemble excess ambitions of so-called genius.
I want to discover a plastic image of harmony in the world and thus enter the 21st century.