Artist's statement:
The work is dedicated to all women who have lost their men - family members in war.
For the composition of the paintings I used images from two pre-First World War English Photographs – girl with brother and mother with son.
I painted the photographs in a Pop-Art style to mark the time – the middle of the XXth century (also the painting with the girl’s figure has just one image of three colours while the painting with the woman’s figure has four multicoloured images of the photograph. This is because a mother’s memories of her son would be much more multifaceted and bright than the memory of the child-sister, who would remember just one scene with her brother from childhood). The figures on the paintings are meant to be mother and daughter – the ghosts who were still visiting their ex-house at our time (where their subsequent descendants are still living, the reference to that is that the ‘Pop-art style prints’ of old photographs are hung on the walls of the house). The Ghosts (figures depicted in black and white) appears next to the ‘prints’ on the walls as they still remember their loss of brother and son. The subject-matter of the Diptych will reach a broad audience as I believe it is does not matter that people rich or poor, whether they are from England or Russia, etc. but the tragedy of the loss and the feelings about it are always the same.
The sketches for painting paintings were created with the usage of computer graphical software and photography and this is why I decided to experiment with embedding technological features into the manual paintings.
Taking into account that a fundamental difference between viewing an image by a human and by the camera is that a human is looking with two eyes while a camera just with one. Therefore it is a big difference in focusing on objects in the composition if the scene painted from life and from the photograph (or the sketch produced with computer). This is why I decided to produce a diptych – paired paintings which can be viewed together (with two eyes) but if you look at each painting separately – the composition of paintings is such that the spectator can only focus on one part of the painting at a time. So I created a sort of optical illusion of viewing the image with one eye as camera would see it.
A very important role in achieving the impression of the viewing of the Diptych ‘as it is seen with two eyes’ is the way that the paintings are hung. The two corner walls are an ideal place for the paintings to be hung to achieve the effect I wanted to achieve. The effect of viewing the Diptych ‘with two eyes’ wouldn’t be achieved if the paintings were hung on one wall, in row.
