About them

How do you feel about your age? I am searching for the answer to this question. In my opinion, it’s not important how old you are, but how old you feel.

Can you remember being a child? How do you perceive yourself? I suppose that you don’t think of yourself as a child or an adult. You are who you are. If I remember my childhood, I see events from the past, but I see myself from the present.

During a phone call grandma Nina told me that the girl from the past still resides in her. In my painting her hands frame her life and show us a specific fragment of her childhood. She is standing in front of her house during the first year of World War II. In the corner you see her future, she is married and moves out from her mother’s house. My grandma as a child, as a young wife and as she is now are in different ways the same person.

What do mothers pass on to daughters? Life seems to repeat itself in a sense. We are a continuation of each other, women who came into this world, growing and changing from generation to generation and still forming a trust and continuity through the different generations.  Above you see a mother, Nina, holding in her arms her second child, Elena. Below her you see Elena, a mother, holding in her arms me, Anastasia. I look back at previous generations and think of how similar we are.                                                                          

Our life decisions, the direction our lives take often seems predetermined by our mother's life. The past is hard to break through. So many decisions are the result of parenting and motherly love.At the same time as my and their past, you see my present. My children are growing up in a different landscape than I did. And that was my decision.

A father's view is shaped by his childhood.  What he missed and what his parents couldn't provide he wants to offer his children. Thus, his childhood leaves its mark on the upbringing of his offspring, even as they gradually become adults.                                                        

You see my father as a child by the river and later as a young man with me, his first child, on his shoulders. He grew up in the Soviet era and economic wealth feels to him like the greatest freedom. Now he is free and does not understand why I do not place the same value on this freedom. He wonders if I am still a child.