January 2004

    Exactly nine years ago, in the beginning of 1995, I launched this project of telling stories of Moscow life online with a small gallery called "Katya's batik". In December of 1994, Katya Gandurina, a wonderful artist then in love with silk, participated in the exhibit called "Games with the Wind". For all the years that passed since then, that page remains among most popular on my Moscow Life project, and many thousand people from across the world enjoyed Katya's early batik works.

    Now, in January of 2004, Katya opened her personal exhibit in the Central House of Actors at Arbat, in the downtown Moscow. She has become a mature painter, working in many different techniques. Besides her new batiks you can see canvas with oil paintings which remind of impressionists of XIX century - or very Japanese ink works...

    It is my real pleasure to post here a set of photos showing new Katya's paintings as a start of the 10th year of Moscow Life project. By the way, let me remind you that you can contact Katya directly to comment on her work - and also observe on my pages a few more of her older works - in the stories of 1996 and 2001

As always in my stories here, you can zoom in on any picture. Just click on an image and a larger and better quality photo will open. Many of the photos are worth looking at in postcard size - in this story more than ever.

   This time the opening ceremony was a small show. Katy was presenting her silk tippets (or maybe stoles will be a better word?) Of course not for clergy, but for ladies longing for new fashion ideas ;-) And these items look better when shown on nice young models rather than hanging motionlessly from the walls or on the racks. So we start with photos of a parade of modles in Katya's long silk tippets.

   Just for comparison - look at the same tippets on the racks after the show is over… Still a marvel, but a still one ;-)

   After all these flying and almost unearthy colors, traditional Japanese black ink on white silk looks sobering and unexpectedly draws all your attention. Katya knows how to play tricks with the audience of her exhibits.

   From clothes she makes a shift towards furniture - because her batik is so universal. Look at the screens below - batik seems to belong there.

   In the report of Katya's exhibit of 2001 I first demonstated her oil paintings. They were marvelously radiating the spirit of Karelia, that strange land of empty roads and dying villages I described in a story here many years ago. Now Katya keeps painting Karelia - still painfully precise - but also shifted her interests a little bit to the West, and presents landscapes of Finland - marine views of Helsinky...

  And one more row of oil and canvas: landscapes of Russian North, landscapes of our souls...

   But I personally still love Katya's batiks most of all - there is some special magic in this technique, there is another mystery in silk itself… And, on top of all that, the highest magic of the painter's talent. Let's look a bit more on new Katya's batiks.

   See you soon again at these pages - with a new story about Moscow and around - I promise that it will be not another art report, but a set of street photos :-)

   And let me repeat at the end of the story: you can contact Katya directly to comment on her work. Please use her e-mail rather than asking me to forward your letter to Katya.

Andrey - asebrant@online.ru