LARGER THAN ME | solo exhibition at Kathrin Cawein Gallery of Art

by Tyler Brumfield

The Kathrin Cawein Gallery of Art is proud to present LARGER THAN ME, and exhibit by Tatyana Ostapenko from Feb. 7 to March 4. Ostapenko is a contemporary painter and a muralist whose art practice is deeply influenced by her experience as an immigrant, as well as by her formative years in the economically and socially unstable environment of post-Soviet Ukraine.

Opening Reception: 

There will be a virtual artist talk on  3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 9,  accessible via Zoom: https://pacificu.zoom.us/j/99550768151
The exhibit is held at the Cawein Gallery in Scott Hall on the Forest Grove Campus. The reception is also In-person attendees must follow campus COVID-19 protocols.

Artist's Statement: 

Tatyana Ostapenko makes contemporary history paintings that record the daily lives of people who don’t usually make it into official historical records. She memorializes the middle children of progress and history, her fellow former Soviet citizens as painting subjects. Old women in flowered kerchiefs, leggy damsels desperate for glamour, indomitable middle-aged women dragging heavy bags to the bus stop march across her expressive magical realist canvases.

A distinguishing feature of her artwork is the juxtaposition of realistic rendering and bold abstract paint application. Having started her artistic journey as a street photographer, Ostapenko uses photographic references and digital collage to generate ideas and compositions. She employs a combination of web sourced amateur photographs, her friends’ family archives, and pictures she has taken during her travels in post-soviet Ukraine. Her painting process is intuitive and open-ended, and while she uses photo collage as a starting point, the finished paintings largely deviate from the source material. Her painting practice is a process of exploration of both materials and subject matter, and her loose and violent mark-making allows for unexpected discovery at the end of each brushstroke. 

The resulting paintings are an inaccurate record of the everyday history of a distinct flavor with a particular voice that is not often heard either in the West, nor in its homeland. Using specific, yet transformed images of her native country, Ostapenko explores the universal themes of human experience: resilience, empathy and humor in the face of adversity.

Artist's Biography: 

Due to her personal history and the collective histories of the former Soviet Union citizens, Ostapenko always comes back to the themes of trans-generational trauma and the gender inequalities that persist in her country of origin as well as in the U.S. She uses images from her native Ukraine to speak about universal human experiences with emphasis on empathy and resilience in the face of adversity. 

Her paintings have been exhibited in regional, national and international museums, galleries and art fairs. She has received professional development grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission. Her artworks have been purchased by public, corporate and private collections, including the city of Seattle and Stumptown Coffee HQ. 

Ostapenko was born in the Soviet Union and raised in Ukraine. She lives in Portland, and holds a BFA in Studio Practice from Portland State University.

Exhibition Info: 

LARGER THAN ME will run from Monday, Feb. 7 until Friday, March 4. The Cawein Gallery of Art is open Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and follows the Pacific University academic calendar regarding holidays and closures. In-person attendees must follow campus COVID-19 protocols.

The exhibition is also available to viewed by appointment. To make an appointment, please send an email to brum1878@pacificu.edu.

Blind Insect Gallery featuring Russian speaking artists in Portland, Oregon

Three Graces
oil and acrylic on canvas
20x36 inches
2020
Available

BARRIO RUSO: artist block party on NE Alberta

“On July 29th, we are excited to present the third installment of BARRIO, a gathering of culture, sounds, flavors, and art. This month Blind Insect Gallery is featuring Russia. Under the umbrella of Russian-speaking artists, the culture that comes forth is unique and diverse in its roots.

As the third installment of this project, we’re going to feature the artworks by the Russian artists Aleksandra Apocalisse, Igor Snigirev, Inna Pustakhanova, Oksana K, Oleg Kash, Tatyana Ostapenko, Anya Mironets, Goni Na Lyubov, and Yana Golberg.

We will explore the sounds of Russian musician and songwriter Irina Myachkin and dance music with the Dj Zhenya. Fools House Art Collective will be bringing us a uniquely immersive experience via theater. @housefoolofart

This BARRIO We are bringing together the flavors of Russia via a participatory style pot luck. We will be happy to see your version of a Russian tapas to share with the community.

All are welcome to come and explore culture and art with the Blind Insect Gallery. Opening Reception and event runs from 6:30pm - 9:00pm on Thursday, July 29th at Blind Insect Gallery.”

— https://www.instagram.com/p/CRPMhuiB8f-/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

PORTLAND OPEN STUDIOS 2020

Portland Open Studios Tour

This is the first year I am participating in the Portland Open Studios tour. During this city wide annual event that takes place on the second and third weekends of October, more than 100 artists open their studios to the public. Any other year there would be a tour map that sends you all around town to get an intimate look at the creative spaces and processes of the local makers. And you’d discover new neighborhoods and a new favorite coffee shop or a brewpub along the way.

“Connecting with artists in their studios gives you the unique opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of their art and where it comes from”

— https://www.travelportland.com/events/portland-open-studios/

With this year's challenges, the tour had to adapt and go online just like so many other cultural events have already. At first I was pretty bummed because I was so looking forward to welcoming visitors into my space, showing my paintings, talking about my ideas and process. And as the year went on and pretty much all of my art presentation was happening exclusively online, I realized that there are great advantages to a virtual open studio tour.

Advantages of virtual artist studio tours

For one, I could invite my friends and collectors from all over the world to participate. I absolutely love my Portland art community. It has been nurturing and supportive ever since I started my journey as a painter 7 years ago. But I always want to take my art to other places, both nationally and internationally, so what a better opportunity to do it in a novel and intimate format of an open studio tour.

Talk about open: Open to the whole world! I love it.

⁠⠀

Technical Challenges and Solutions

I moved studios just a few months ago and while I love this space, it presents a few challenges. The main one is that there is no natural light. And coming from a large industrial loft with a wall of windows, it's quite a change. There was a lot of trial and error. I finally figured out how to light my work space properly just to discover that what is more than sufficient for painting, is woefully dark for video. 

It feels like an eternity since the last time I installed a show, and I can't wait to get all these small but mighty ladies up on my studio wall. It is so much fun to see them all together.

Installing artwork: A wall of babushkas

I am often so consumed by my projects and ideas, always working toward something new, pushing forward, that I forget to take a step back and take it all in. And installing artwork for this event gave me the opportunity to spend time with all these paintings and just be in their presence. It’s been a great experience, and new ideas and connections I haven’t noticed before emerged as a result.

You might wonder how long it took me to install this wall and honestly I didn’t count the hours, and it didn’t take days. Having curated a gallery for a few years, I have a lot of experience installing shows. My process might appear haphazard, but in reality it’s just a very intuitive approach to artwork installation. I hang shows the way I paint: I respond to the subjects and materials: I don’t think, I just move. And the same way as I am not afraid of mistakes on a painting (there is always more paint!) I am not concerned about trying a layout just to find out it doesn't work (there is always putty for the walls and more nails in the box.)

Here’s a little sneak peek of the Babushka Wall. Please forgive my less than stellar camerawoman skills. I recorded this while picking up the camera on the tripod and moving the whole cumbersome contraption around. Which made me realize something I never thought I would have to do, but: I have to buy a selfie stick for the official IG Live event! Yup, a selfie stick. They have stabilizers, so it will be less bumpy and woozy when I move around the studio.

How shaky is my camera work? 😅

Visit my studio virtually with IG Live

And you can see them all together, from afar and up close and personal if you tune into my IG Live on October 18th at 1pm Pacific Time. I am @postsovietart on Instagram. Here’s a link to my account and if you follow me, you’ll get a notification when the livestream begins.

You have to have an Instagram account to watch the broadcast. If you don’t or aren’t available at that time, send me an email contact@tatyanaostapenko.com and we’ll set you up with your own private studio visit.

But hurry, this orderly and well organized wall of babushkas will descend into the usual chaos of a working artist studio shortly after this Sunday open studio tour. 🙃

Now's the time to schedule a studio visit with your favorite artist

Image credit: Erin Chipps Photography

Do you follow artists on social media, quietly double tap the images, read captions and maybe occasionally leave a comment with a few praise words and emojis? Are you too shy to ask questions, offer your opinion or share how the artist’s works makes you feel just because you don’t think yourself qualified to express opinions about such lofty matters as art?

Guess what? The artists on the other end of this shy dance are shy and insecure as well! Hell, we are shyer and more insecure than most.

The “art world” is designed to feel exclusive and unreachable. It’s exclusive and unreachable for the majority of artists, not just for you.

But I really want you to take the following to heart:

YOU ARE A PART OF THE ART WORLD

Yep, you!

You are here reading an artist’s blog.

Paintings, sculpture and installations  regularly show up on your social media feed. You wish you knew if the artwork you saw this morning was for sale and wish you could afford it, but would never dare to ask for the fear of offending the refined and lofty creature that is the Artist.

You spend time with art, even if only on your phone screen. And you are a part of the conversation and I want to tell you that the artists want to hear what you have to say!

Image credit: Erin Chipps Photography

One way of entering that conversation is through an artist studio visit

Back in the good ol’ days that would mean walking into into a battered warehouse in an industrial part of town, climbing some rickety stairs to get to a suffocatingly hot or a freezing cold raw loft studio to observe this exotic creature, the Artist, in her native habitat.

So let’s make some lemonade from the new crop of pandemic lemons and use our newly acquired teleconferencing skills to bring the studio visit experience to the comfort of our homes without the turpentine fume exposure.

In the last four months I’ve had more studio visits than I had in the prior two years. 

The lockdown has normalized digital meetings and has forced many artists to turn to new ways of presenting our work and engaging with our audiences and art world professionals.

it’s been surprisingly easy, fun and comfortable.  I am not saying that a digital studio visit is better than a real one. However, it does allow a close approximation of the experience. And it’s fantastic for being able to meet artists who live far away from you.  While I hope that one day we can travel as usual, not all of us have the luxury of hopping on a plane just to meet our favorite artist and see their work.

This is what I want you to keep in mind about doing a studio visit:

• Artists WANT to show you their work 

• Artists tend to work alone a lot, they crave interaction and feedback

• You don't have to buy anything! This is an invitation to engage, exchange ideas, and mutual learning and discovery. It is NOT a sales pitch. But if you do fall in love with a piece, feel free to ask whether it’s for sale and the price.

• Your questions aren't stupid. You don't have to be an art historian or an art buff to have an engaging conversation with an artist whose work you find interesting. Art is not some sort of special category that only the select few are allowed into

And if you need a welcoming and easy going studio artist experience to get a taste for it, book one with me!

Just write me a brief message with your preferred dates and times and we’ll connect on a teleconferencing platform of your choice. I am always excited to invite you to my studio.

SCHEDULE YOUR STUDIO VISIT

And here’s a short video of a studio visit I had with a fellow artist, arts educator and podcaster Brainard Carey.

VIRTUAL STUDIO VISIT WITH BRAINARD CAREY

COLLECTIVE MEMORY, SOCIALIST REALISM AND CONTEMPORARY PAINTING

View fullsize

Assembly
30x36 inches
oil and acrylic on canvas
2019
in private collection

I was really excited when an Australian artist Melissa Corbett approached me about recording an interview. Melissa is living and working in Spain and has been hosting artist interviews on her blog. Melissa is passionate about paper which is the unifying medium for her collage, printmaking, watercolors and comics. She embraces her obsession with pop and counterculture, and she is dedicated to social change.

Melissa’s warm and welcoming personality is perfect for interviewing strangers, and she made me feel immediately at ease even though I generally try to avoid being on video. Her questions were well researched and insightful, and it was a great experience geek out about art history together.

We talked about my history and experiences of growing up in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine, as well as the trajectory of Socialist Realism that become the dominant artistic doctrine in the USSR and reined supreme for many decades.

I am by no means an expert on the matter, but I am an eyewitness to its pervasive presence, the thorough infiltration into everyday life.  Just like many people in the West claim to be immune to the insidious power of advertising due to having been exposed to it for so long, the same way many former soviet citizens ironically dismissed the propaganda-laden images of muscular steel workers and robust collective farm milk maids. 

Socialist Realism of my youth continues to influence my paintings

Happy collective farm workers in a painting by Tatyana Golembievskaya (1967)

Tatyana Ostapenko
Harvest
36x48 inches
acrylic on canvas
SOLD

We all carry with us the indoctrination of our youth.

Our environments, the visual language that surrounds us nudges, if not thrusts us toward particular ideologies, no matter how independent and free thinking we think ourselves.  

I grew up surrounded by images of impossibly happy children, noble cosmonauts and tractor operators with chiseled jaws that would make Superman wither with envy. They were always gazing into the glorious future, somewhere far off from the confines of the painted surfaces, into the promised bright beyond that we all were marching toward together.

View fullsize

Sentry
64x48 inches
acrylic on canvas
2019
SOLD

Now, I have to make one thing clear, very few people in my immediate surroundings believed any of this messianic deliverance-to-the-glorious-future rhetoric. The short period of pre-collapse soviet history I got to witness was definitely tinted by more sarcasm and cynicism than great sacrifice for the great communist beyond. Murmurs of descent were audible even to my very young ears. Transistor radios were tuned to the jammed signals from BBC and Radio Liberty, carbon copy typewriter pages of banned books were circulating almost freely between friends and political jokes were accorbic.

Gorbachev Evening News
18x24 inches
oil on canvas
2016
in private collection

There is an awesome power of the visual image, especially if it is carefully crafted for indoctrination. Despite knowing them to be heralds of false hope and outright lies, the pictorial language and a cast of characters of Socialist Realism were the constant silent companions of my youth. And they are all still here, downloaded into my subconscious, alive and well despite the collapse of the empire that populated every wall and placard with them.


Instead of denying my dubious heritage, I embrace it. I reference compositions, stiff heroic figures and vast landscapes that characterize Socialist Realist paintings. They inform my current art practice, just as much as El Greco’s emaciated and ecstatic saints or Sargent’s panterly bravura. (I was a strange child, might not come as a surprise to you, but I used to draw from El Greco’s paintings when I was about eight years old. That was my idea of fun. Kinda still is.) 


and if you are still reading,

Here is the full interview with Melissa Corbett

ARTIST STUDIO PRACTICE ON LOCKDOWN

INTERVIEWS, DISCUSSIONS AND MUSINGS

This has been a busy month!

I know, it sounds strange because we are on lockdown and can’t go anywhere. But this is precisely the reason.

Suddenly the whole world is much more on my wavelength and a lot of the art world interaction and networking has moved online. While I love seeing artwork in real life, I sincerely dislike the party scene atmosphere of gallery openings and many art events. I hate mingling and making small talk. I like talking about things of substance and mutual interest. Art nerd talk.

And the format of an online studio visit, live video interview and email exchanges suits my nerdy, vehemently introverted self just fine. And now that everyone else is on board with me, I am thoroughly in my element. Yay!

And since a lot of recent questions and discussions come up regularly in my communication with both collectors and arts professionals, I decided to put some of them together in one place here.

Welcome to my breakfast nook video recording studio

It has great natural light for video recordings and interviews

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Q&A:

Q: Super interested in your palette. Does it reflect a time period?

A: it does. I always think back to the 90s, the post Berlin Wall Ukraine: lots of mud, dust and concrete with the occasional bright spot of a coveted imported plastic bag or a fake designer sweatshirt. All manner of brown grays with a sudden scream of neon green or extra saturated fuchsia.

This is a great question. It made me realize that this is precisely where my palette comes from. And I always thought it came from 19th century realism with a touch of Die Brücke…

Q: have you ever thought to use objects to paint on that are not canvas/board, or picked other shapes besides squares and rectangles?

A: I have considered it. While I have seen outstanding examples of merging of painting and sculpture, I am not compelled to create those myself. At least not right now while I am still interested in figurative representational painting.

I thoroughly enjoy the suspension of disbelief that the idea of a painting provides within the context of the Western art tradition. Akin to a theater stage once the actors enter it, transcends its nature and becomes an opening to a different world, providing a platform for imagination to unfold. I want to make my supports as non-self aware as they can be, as to make them all but invisible and simply provide the stage for the magic within.

Q: Have you ever felt that there is something that needs to be said? Or some hidden/past that can be revived?

A: There is an element of reluctantly indulged nostalgia in my work. I am repeatedly drawn to images taken around the time I was a child. I think a lot of my interest in the late Soviet and post-Soviet time is purely selfish and self focused. I want to re-live, re-experience my childhood. I want to understand the larger time and epoch when it happened. But ultimately it’s my memory and longing for a child-like perception of the world that dictates my reference choices.

Q: I think Americans react to something in your work, but obviously won’t understand the references. What do you think others are getting from your work and does it matter?

A: I am deeply invested in using reference images that are important, relevant and meaningful to me. I am certain they don’t communicate directly with an American audience, especially if my viewers aren’t too familiar with Soviet/Post-Soviet environs.

I don’t expect to have a universal appeal or deliver some manner of pan-cultural message, yet perhaps the limited palette, my muted color choices, and interactions between the figures and the environment can convey a certain sense of unease, unfinished transition, unsettling change and displacement.

Q: what does the material mean to you? How does this relate to your content?

A: The material reins supreme for me. I am all about paint, the act of painting. The malleability, the unpredictability as well as ability to describe form exactly, to represent the light and create veritable shadows… I am in love with paint!

I’ve always wanted to paint. My content is just something that holds my attention well and long enough to indulge in the luxury of smearing paint around.

Q: Have you considered creating a series, a story that pulls the viewer in?

A:  All my recent shows are strongly unified by content. Thematically and visually they are a series. My work was included in a group show at the Ford Gallery a few months ago. The show title was Around the Narrative Lens. The curatorial idea was to show artists whose work is often perceived to have strong narrative and to engage in a dialog about such perception and artists intention. I feel like all my paintings are a part of one large series. A disjunctive, non linear narrative, for certain. More Faulkner than Steven King. 

Q: can a painting capture or take further the idea of preservation that treats paint not as a preservative but as blocks of raw intensities. (raw = the light of a moment or a gust of wind on a particular day)

A: Oh, do I dearly wish for raw intensity. I certainly do! I want the abandon of gesture, yet at the same time I absolutely have to improve my representational skills. Perhaps I’ve been focusing on accuracy too much and it’s time to indulge in some abandon.

Sargent and de Kooning on the same surface… Not too high of a goal for after seven years of painting, right?

Q: When piecing together a picture plane with some recognizable elements and blurred edges/spaces, I wonder what (content-wise) ends up on the surface? Similarly, what is cut out and/or reassembled?

A: Sometimes there are new elements that emerge, say, glowing under-painting suggesting smoldering fire, etc, but usually once I’ve decided loosely on the composition, the content takes on the guiding, yet secondary role and the painting becomes an exercise in paint handling and formal decision-making.

Q: is the abstraction and ambiguity you seem after in your work related to the politics tied to your process, or do they want reconciliation?

A: I feel like abstraction and ambiguity has more chances of transcending the very specific time and place and have more universal psychological impact. I also don’t want to come across as preachy and insisting on a particular solution. I am more concerned with intimate individual experience and how it’s affected by the larger political forces.

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Give me De Kooning and Courbet: I want mundane and uncanny on the same canvas

I bring the sensibilities and influences of both Soviet socialist realism as well as the classical European painting tradition to my thoroughly contemporary immigrant perspective.  I am both the old and the new.

Instead of destroying or denying the old, I take what I love about it and put it into my employ to serve my contemporary purposes. I use the tradition of realism to anchor my shaky identity of a transplant who’s been trying to assimilate into a different culture and temporality. 

I want both, the mastery of old and the audacity of the new.
I want to de Kooning and Courbet on the same canvas.
I want the rich glow of traditional oil disrupted by the violence that can only show itself in painting now.
I want my roots to show.

I paint tired people from underprivileged backgrounds. I paint over-sexualized young girls who think that a thicker layer of lipstick and a fuller fringe of fake lashes will give them a chance to escape the habitual squalor to a sunny life from a luxury cruise ship advert.

I paint mediocrity and the absurd. I paint what my life would have been had I not left.
I feel contempt and compassion, I feel survivor’s guilt. I wonder if I have the right to my imagery.
How longer can I live away from a place and still claim authenticity when depicting it? Aren’t I a tourist in my own past, and my alternative present by now?

I am after the absurd and uncanny, but only so slightly. 
I love it in the middle: the slightly dusty, not too worn out, pinching, but not rubbing raw; the mild annoyance that wears at the patience of living. 
I want the texture that is seen every day, familiar to the last crack and crevasse, and therefore rendered invisible. 
I want the familiar uncanny, the strangeness of an otherwise mundane dream, obliquely noticed yet not peculiar enough to demand scrutiny.