Category Archives: Summer 2010

When I was writing my proposal for the Charles Center scholarship I addressed the art and oral history aspects of my project separately. Aside from the obvious common ground of the place and people, I didn’t consider them to overlap. And yet, during my time in Russia I kept finding similarities between the principles of [...] Continue reading →

After spending a full six weeks in Vishny Volochok at the Academic Dacha, My brother said our goodbyes, packed up, and left for Moscow. But our time in Russia still wasn’t over for almost 3 weeks. We spent the remainder of our time with a painter named Ilya Yatsenko, who has been a friend of [...] Continue reading →

In my postings up to now I’ve talked about what I spent the vast majority of my time doing in Russia – painting. But no less important to my project, though it took up much less of my time was the oral history project I conducted with artists at the Academic Dacha. That’s what I [...] Continue reading →

The weekend of June 13th we took a train to St. Petersburg to see an exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of Isaak Levitan’s birthday. Levitan was one of the 19th century’s greatest landscape painters. He may still be Russia’s most loved landscape painter. For anyone working with the landscape, the exhibition would be a must-see. [...] Continue reading →

Our first two weeks in Volochok we spent painting – in the morning, midday and evening, which during summer lasts until eleven when the sun finally sets. Our focus was on short etudes in oil – from life. For the most part we painted landscapes – in fields, on river banks and in the woods [...] Continue reading →

(I was without internet during my time in Russia, and so over the next few days I’ll finally be posting my blog entries – pictures pending until I get a hold of a scanner.) The night before leaving we got a call from a painter friend who had worked with the Kugach’s before. He warned [...] Continue reading →