“I’m sorry,” the painter says. [She looks baffled, and attempts to smile, haplessly.] “I lost my train of thought…. Oh yes,” [Her voice gradually regains its self-possessed tenor and flows evenly, stumbling only occasionally over the most treacherous twists and shallows of thought.] “it’s not just about technique. I work with objects that have been in everyday use, or, rather, what’s left of them. The pieces of china that form a mosaic on the canvas are shards of actual dinnerware and figurines. The same goes for the car visors, and the pieces of fabric, burlap, knitting—I rarely use anything new; things that have been in use have a special feel to them, they’re warm. So, if you want to talk about my sense of a female legacy, I’m kind of inverting, mirroring something women had done since ancient times—decorating their everyday lives. Traditionally, it is the applied arts, and not studio painting, that has been the feminine domain, especially here in Ukraine, where all ornamental painting has always been done by women. That’s the tradition all our primitivists come from—Prymachenko, Sobachko-Shostak—where else if not from the world of painted stoves and sideboards? Even Aleksandra Ekster in the mid-1920s designed patterns for artisan carpet-making co-ops around Mykolaiv, until the government sent them all packing.”
“Really?” the reporter croons. “I had no idea…”
“So yes, there you have it. And I do the opposite—I work with what’s ruined, the wrecked home, so to speak—trying to build something new, but different, out of it.”
“And succeeding,” says the interviewer. [Her sudden response has an unintentional reverence that instantly erects an impenetrable glass barrier between her and the object of her admiration. The painter squints.] “Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident is, in my opinion, absolutely brilliant.” [The painter mumbles incomprehensibly.] “Really, I mean it; it’s a postmodern classic! Who bought it?”
“The Lausanne Hermitage.”
“Well, how nice for them—they could just go and buy themselves a Vladyslava Matusevych!” [She turns to the camera emphatically, so that no one could possibly miss this. A few sparrows blow off a table nearby, startled by the dramatic pronouncement.] “And we are too poor even to put together a national museum of contemporary art! It is a splendid piece, truly splendid.” [She slows her pace to a luxuriant purr, as if savoring the painting’s every detail in her mind again.] “And now we’ll only have the slide to appreciate.” [She looks down and reads from prepared notes.] “The painting visualizes a complete drama, composed of small fragments of evidence that usually go unnoticed. In its own way, the work is highly cinematographic, like a montage in which each cut speaks volumes, so one can spend hours reading it, frame by frame—the broken glasses, the receipts, a customs declaration, a picture of a husband and a child tucked into a notebook, a bronzer with a shattered mirror, and those horrific bloody smears on top of…”
“That’s lipstick, Daryna!” the painter interrupts, laughing. [She is visibly relieved to have the conversation move off the laudatory and on to the technical track.] “The smudges on the mirror—that’s actual lipstick, Revlon, I just fixed it with varnish.”
“No kidding? Finally, I have a chance to ask—I’ve been dying to ask you this: Didn’t it scare you to make this? Wasn’t it unsettling—to compose, literally, a still life?”
The painter shrugs. “I was curious,” she says after a moment’s hesitation. [The word is like a clear spot she’s found on an icy sidewalk.] “I’ve had this idea since that Swissair flight went down over Halifax, remember, back in ’98, and for a week divers fished personal belongings out of the water to help identify the victims—what if all that’s left of you is your purse? What will it tell people who never met you? And then one day my own lipstick came uncapped and smashed all over my compact in my purse, and that’s when I saw what it should look like on canvas. But to say I was unsettled? You should tell me—you’ve seen the whole series in my studio before it went to Switzerland—did it feel unsettling to look at?”
“That’s the amazing thing—it’s a radiant piece! It’s got this easy energy, like it emanates light—all your Secrets do, despite the chaos they portray. It’s as if you tamed death, domesticated it.” [The interviewer falters, unsettled a little by where the train of thought has carried her, and instantly hurries to explain herself.] “I don’t mean it in the way Hollywood horror flicks would have it; there’s not a whiff of fright in your work, but—How do I put it?… There’s your elegant composition; the warmth of your incredibly vivid, sun-drenched Southern-steppes palette; and your delicate ornamental touches, so sweet and so domestic—it all makes you forget that the whole series is about death, ruination. A piece like your Contents would look fine in a living room—not just a museum!”
“And you’d put it there? In your living room?” [The painter leans in, intently, in an upward motion, again like a cat about to leap into a tree, her gleaming eyes wide and expectant, and her lips parted slightly, ready to lap up the words that drop.] “Honestly—would you?”
“Oh my God, are you kidding? I’d kill for it! Only I’m sorry, Vlada, who has the money for such luxury?” [The brunette giggles lightheartedly, electrified like a woman in a jewelry store, giddy at the mere chance to look, touch, even try things on.] “I certainly don’t make enough to afford a Matusevych.”
[She says this with a clear note of pride—the kind of pride easily recognized by any first-generation career professional in a country where to identify specifically what you cannot afford (a BMW 6 Series, a Tiffany necklace, a Matusevych) is to draw a wide circle around scores of less-exclusive possessions that you can in fact afford, unlike the vast majority of your compatriots, and with the same naïve, neophyte pride of a global provincial dropping the name Vladyslava Matusevych, as meaningfully as the world’s art-loving bourgeois utter Picasso or Matisse—the pride of a teenager who feels at home among the grown-ups. The painter, however, is not flattered by this intonation—she appears to occupy a different store altogether.]
“Thank you, Daryna,” she says simply. “This is very important for me, what you’ve just said. I’ll give you a painting, no worries, as a present. Not Contents of a Purse, of course, a different one, but from the same series, from Secrets. You’ll come over and choose one, okay?”
[Even under the thick layer of makeup, one can see the interviewer’s face grow suddenly darker as she blushes with a breathless thrill—all the way past her ears.]
“Don’t shoot this!” the brunette cries out, laughing. [She turns her entire body to the camera to block the shot. The sudden motion makes the silk Versace scarf wound carelessly around her bare neck slip and begin to slide off, and she pins it with both hands against her collarbones. This looks comical in the frame—like an ingénue actress in her first role as a simple-hearted provincial maiden who’s just cried out in joy and clasped her hands to her bosom.]