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Username: lena_levin
Member Since: January 2012
Member Since: January 2012
Fremont, CA United States
As a painter, I sometimes feel myself displaced in time for about a century. The major breakthroughs in the XIX-th century painting opened a multitude of paths to be pursued and explored, but the historical catastrophes of the last century and the po... more
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| Gender: | Female |
| Artist Statement: | As a painter, I sometimes feel myself displaced in time for about a century. The major breakthroughs in the XIX-th century painting opened a multitude of paths to be pursued and explored, but the historical catastrophes of the last century and the powerful influence of its painting geniuses blocked some of them -- and I feel myself still at that cross-road, somewhere before the first world war, with unexplored roads in painting still invitingly open. I still linger at the edge between immediate and specific visual impressions and abstraction, between synthesis and analysis, between throwing stones and gathering stones. I paint simple things, and each of my paintings refers to a specific place and time. Each is faithful to the reality of the moment, and yet none is realistic in the usual sense of the word. What fascinates me in a painting is not how similar to a real scene it might look, but rather the distance between the two: it is in this space between the supposed "reality" of the actual visual impression and the reality of its painted representation that the emotional state of the viewer is hidden. Just as a lyric poem invites its reader to say the words, and thereby enter the emotional state of its speaker, so an easel painting puts its viewer into the shoes of the observer of the scene — and asks them to recognize the tension between what is and what is being seen. |
| Education: | Ph.D. Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg Post-doctoral qualification, University of Bielefeld, Germany. |
| Artistic Influences: | Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pavel Filonov, Valentin Serov, Michail Vrubel, Pablo Picasso, Mark Chagall, Vassily Kandinksy. |
| Artist Tags: | impressionsism, post-impressionism, plein air, landscape, still life |
