NOVEMBER
…AND THE NESTING INSTINCT
This year it snowed in early November. It wasn't in a daily forecast, it was such an unexpected treat and it was easy to feel like a child again.
Studio on snowy morning
Even in my young nomadic years I would always return home in November to spend a winter. My mom keeps bringing up the fact that one especially cold winter I stayed in my apartment three months without ever leaving the place. I kept bribing my young neighbor with cigarette money to go to a store and buy groceries for me. After many chaotic years I’m back at it - starting November I rarely leave my house. I turn it into warm nest and my husband doesn’t mind grocery shopping.
I’m growing to like winter season. Not the cold, oh no. But the thoughtfulness of it, the essence of change. The tenderness of the birds sharing the feeder, they are invisible in a summer, hidden in lush green. I love tree silhouettes against a non-colored sky, all fussiness of flowers and foliage stripped away. I love piles of blankets and piles of books. I came to this country with two suitcases of books and paintings. My life is threaded into a chain of books I have read, and I can follow them all the way back to a little girl on a floor of sunlit room in kindergarten. My mind is a clatter and chaos but I remember the first book I read - and the day I read it. Learning to read wasn’t a process for me. It was magic, the day before I didn’t know how to read and next day I read a small kiddy book and it was superpower. That’s how I see art. There’s a story, many steps and events, beginning, progression, and the end. But the artist is a magician, and lets you see only one page, the last one. And you know the rest is also there, compressed. Like a manuscript, a stack of glorious pages, but you can only see the one on top. And that is enough. You can unravel the thread and make it your own, and reel yourself in until you recognize yourself in the book. In the painting. In music. In black and white image made of thousands of words that never been said or written. And you’re not a stranger anymore, you belong there, and landscape is never ending and sun never sets. You’re home, and it’s winter, and you’re holding universe on your lap. You’re honored - and entrusted - with the gift of always shifting and shimmering soul of the artist.
“There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.”
