CHAPTER 6
PREMONITIONS
THE SECRET OF CREATIVITY
The secret of creativity is known only by the artist/creator and God. So far no one else has succeeded in finding it out. Once, during a walk in Petrozavodsk, Vladimir admitted to me, There are no inspired sculptures here, seeing which one would stop in astonishment.
I recalled at once one of our favorite writers, Antoine de Saint Exupery. He claimed that culture is an invisible treasure because it is based not on material things but on the invisible ties which link these things and give them a particular order. I was tormented by questions. Why did Exupery write his fairy tale The Little Prince in 1942, during the heat of the war? Why did Dostoevskii write while he was doing hard labor?
I shared my conclusions with Vladimir, Art cannot be put away for later. Nothing can cause a deviation from someone’s destiny. Nothing can serve as its justification. The greats never abandoned creativity, and did not blame deviations from their destinies on the prosaic nature of life, on family, war, emigration, or the political system. They felt their formulas with their hearts.
There’s some misunderstanding here, Volodia replied. Maiakovskii ended his own life. He committed suicide.
No, they don’t kill themselves, I disagreed. Tsvetaeva, Esenin, Maiakovskii, and Hemngway did not kill themselves. They were killed. They had no choice. They did not want to deviate from their own destinies and death gave them this solution.
I knew that Fomin and St. Exupery preached the same thing: “Before creating, one has to live.” In the years we spent in Petrozavodsk, we acquired many ill-wishers and detractors. From time to time we heard that someone hated Fomin so much that he wished him dead. Apparently this is a common occurrence.
PEOPLE ARE NOT MADE JUST FOR SURVIVAL
When Vladimir tried to cheer me up, he used to say that we were intellectually equal. For that reason, having combined our worlds into one, we allowed almost no one to enter it. The following thoughts appeared as a result of complete loneliness. Such things happen to people who have no one, except one another, with whom to share their secrets.
I told him, The more the nervous system and the brain are developed in certain species, the more they are in danger of becoming insane. Whales, elephants, apes, dogs, and people go mad. But this doesn’t happen to bacteria. Humanity accepts only one form of existence – the illusory one. Man exists only through love. Even those who don’t feel it, live through their connections, which is just one of its forms. Why are spiders able to survive in cosmic space for ten thousand years or why are the vipers in Canada, who freeze for the winter and thaw in the spring, provided with a natural antifreeze? Why do shrimp in Africa survive in almost boiling conditions, while people are dying of AIDS and other horrifying illnesses? If we were not created to survive, does it mean that we were not created to live?
Volodia corrected me. He said, We were created not for survival, but for life. The creatures survive, but man was given a full and infinite life by the Creator. I can draw with China ink on paper. The world I create will be in two colors, but perhaps it will survive longer than the canvas on which I explore the world of colors. God is pleased by the entire world, not only the gray world of man, gray like a spider, even if the price for it is madness. Man was not created just for survival.
HOW THE SERIES WERE MADE
On the 16th of June, 2000, we were watching the second part of a documentary about Pablo Picasso, A Portrait of an Artist. Right after the movie, Volodia showed me a new drawing and said:
Look, under the influence of Picasso, yesterday I drew a woman on a duck and I want to call my new series Maidens, Ladies, and Madonnas.
I was astonished by the drawing. But you drew it yesterday and we did not see similar pictures by Picasso yesterday. Different pictures were shown.
Fomin’s woman on a duck resembled the portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter from the period of Picasso shown in the second part of the documentary. When Volodia saw Marie-Thérèse on the screen, he exclaimed, How I love round forms!
Looking at Fomin’s new drawing, I said: Picasso was like a virus. He was a stranger, an alien who arrived on earth. To change the world, he penetrated people’s conscience. The majority on this planet gets used to NOT WORKING and NOT LIVING. Picasso procreated through the artistic process, multiplied in its various forms, adapted to life, not immune from the extremes. I stand on my knees in front of his life and his art. I bow to Picasso – the best medicine for despair and melancholy. Long live ‘corrida’ – the fullness of life!
Fomin answered: Regardless of various periods in his life and differences in his pictures, Picasso is in every one of his paintings. The same thing is reflected in the works of Van Gogh, Dali, Chagall, and myself.
When my husband was working on the paintings of the Friedrich Nietzsche series, I read to him the works of that genius, who had affected him deeply. I allowed myself to compare Nietzsche to Picasso. Inspired by Nietzsche’s statement that in a labyrinth every man is looking for Ariadne, not for truth, we started talking about Ariadne’s thread in Nietzsche – about his style and his three creative stages. At first, Nietzsche mastered his style and played with it as much as one can play with words. Then, his style turned against him – the words escaped the frames of meaning put in it by the author. The words became understandable only to those for whom they were not intended. The result was that the style was not powered by the will of the individual but resembled a “machine ready to break into pieces.” In other words, it was Nietzsche, working automatically, but already destroyed by his own style. A moment came when the man who seemed to have achieved perfection understood that perfection is unreachable. Why? Perfection cannot be reached because at a certain point it destroys the individual, destroys its own creator, exactly like the great heroic deeds kill their heroes. That’s where I mentioned Picasso. I compared the third period in the philosopher’s work to the late period of the painter.
No, Vladimir responded, creative process is not work. Picasso did not work, but rather he was fighting until the end. He had not seen his destiny at once as had Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Brueghel… He did not have his own style. He kept searching. He found one thing, then another… At the end of his life his name was working for him.
In Vladimir’s opinion, three things in Picasso’s life sufficed to establish his name and make him a genius for centuries to come: strong composition, strong plasticity, and strong color. But to these three things, as my husband said, was added a special kind of carelessness, which Picasso splashed out in his sketches and paintings. Fomin considered Picasso a pagan. His life and creative process were like a fire with its flames burning unattended, moving, singing, dancing, and enchanting… Nietzsche created an inner system, explained my husband. He had a program. It was a pyramid. In contrast, Picasso tried to combine art with art’s shadow.
Fomin is one of a few people for whom the stratifications of Picasso’s art are obvious. He studied Picasso. He studied beauty. In my opinion, this can be done only by a special breed of people. Everybody, including myself, can devote entire life to this. But only creative individuals are given the ability to comprehend beauty. It is not revealed and does not belong to anyone else. Vladimir had an uncanny ability to understand beauty. He said, Picasso’s paintings are beautiful. He knew the formula of beauty and it makes no difference whether he was subordinating his art to logic or veered off into emotions and then returned to logic again. If the next Picasso ever appeared, the world would not be interested in him. And Nietzsche became a slave of his style; he could not abandon it; he lived it. I also cannot abandon myself – my own style.
Having painted Three Transformations of the Spirit, he reminded me about the three stages of spirit’s transformation in Nietzsche: the camel, the lion, and the child. At first, man loads his life up, carries his burdens. Then, he becomes a lion – a symbol of prosperity and status in society. And only when he becomes a child he can allow himself whims and fantasies.
The lion cannot create new values, but the lion’s power can provide freedom for new creation. Why would the powerful lion want to become a child? A child means innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a hoop driven with a stick, an initial movement, and the sacred word of affirmation… The game of creation requires the sacred word of affirmation: now the spirit asks for will power and the existing world finds the lost world.
For Fomin, Picasso and Dali were the artistic heroes of our times. With one foot they stepped into the twentieth century and with the other into the twenty-first. They electrified it and that is probably why we visited all world museums which preserved their great heritage: Picasso museums in Barcelona and Paris, Dali museums in Cadaqués, Figueres, and the American city of St. Petersburg, and exhibitions in Moscow, Stuttgart, and Paris….
One day Fomin told me about his plans. Earlier, I did not understand the style Picasso developed in his mature period. But now I want to follow in that direction; otherwise I will not have time to tell people anything in my elaborate style. I am deforming my style in my own way to express my ideas in a freer, bolder manner.
Northern lights preceded the appearance of the first picture from the Tales of the North series. We saw them for the first time in Petrozavodsk, when we were walking across a bridge. God came up with Northern lights in order for us to love the Artist in Him, Vladimir announced. The next day, the sketch of the painting was ready…
After the success of Peer Gynt in Norway, we had reasons to expect similar success for the Tales of the North there. We read all the Norwegian folk tales published in Russian and they became the material for the series. But, as it turned out, the tales were not needed in their motherland. Instead, the series found success in America.
In the fall of 2003, we received an unexpected call from a gallery in the USA. We were asked to send good quality images from various series. In exchange, the gallery promised to organize a show of posters of the paintings in the Market Center in Atlanta in November and December. We agreed. At that time, the cultural process in Russia had come to understand that an exhibition of works, even from museum collections, for example, from the treasury of the Hermitage, in a large market center abroad should be considered the pride of our country. The gallery was relatively well known. After we received the photographs of the poster show from Atlanta and the announcements in the press, the gallery vanished, as if it had never existed.
SMART PEOPLE
One day I shared with Volodia my anxiety about the fact that the men I knew considered me too smart to engage in a conversation. As a rule, they felt uncomfortable hearing my unexpected evaluations of their words. My husband was able to relieve my anxiety. He said, Smart people don’t impress me. Only those who pay for my paintings impress me. Thanks to them, I am able to create.
We had a discussion about the role of a woman in man’s life. In his opinion, women always push men to do something. I tried to find a more exact analogy. God gives every man a steering mechanism in the shape of a woman. Only with a smart companion can a man fly in the right direction. Life is like a wardrobe. Everything in this wardrobe is arranged on various shelves. A stupid wife or lover makes circles with her finger, trying to choose. The smart one points her finger at the single, largest target, understanding that the small targets (as the Academician Dmitrii Likhachev used to say) turn man into nothing, while the large ones elevate him. It’s a long flight to reach the large target. It’s easier to pollinate the tiny targets, but it does not make sense.
Look at Salvador Dali, reminded me Fomin, who said about his wife that had he not met Gala he would have ended his life in a pigsty, dressed in lice-infested rags.
A FRIEND
Thinking about connections between history and fates of individuals, Pushkin once said that there are strange rapprochements.
An American professor, a graduate of two universities (the Universities of Warsaw and Kansas), and an art historian, Alexander Boguslawski, found Fomin’s site while working on his own web site about the Russian popular print (lubok). The students in his History of Russian Art class were subsequently assigned an essay about the painter. A correspondence between the professor and the artist began. Boguslawski was a teacher at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, a small private liberal arts college with a great reputation and old traditions and a small student body. The students are required to follow a broad education not limited to just their majors and strive to acquire in four years the broadest education possible. Some of the most intellectually adventurous enroll in Boguslawski’s Russian Studies classes.
The professor turned out to be a Renaissance man. His knowledge was truly universal. He spoke several languages. He was a specialist in Old Russian literature and icon painting. He had defended his dissertation on Russian hagiographical icons of St. Nicholas. He painted icons and fantasy oils. He knew everything about the literature, poetry, painting, and film of contemporary Russia. He participated in the international seminar on modern Russian culture in Moscow, and allocated ten days before the seminar in July, 2004, to a visit to his Internet friend, Vladimir Fomin. He later revealed in an interview given to the Russian press: The exchange of ideas on various topic over the Internet led to the genuine need to meet face-to-face. We “virtually” felt we would become good friends.
When Alexander appeared in our apartment, I treated him simply as an American interested in my husband’s work. How wrong I was! This man became closer to us than our blood relatives.
Vladimir and Alexander went on a pilgrimage to deeply spiritual, eternal places – to the monastery of Aleksandr Svirskii, a monk who in the northern forest had a vision of the Trinity, and to the holy land of Valaam. I asked father Nikolai Ozolin to welcome Boguslawski in his house on the island of Kizhi and to give him an opportunity to meet with and talk to the icon restorers there. Shortly before his departure to Moscow, we went on a rafting trip down the Shuia River.
Visiting the Karelian Museum of Fine Arts in Petrozavodsk, the professor noted that its permanent exhibition included many inferior works and, surprisingly, it featured none of Fomin’s paintings. He mentioned this later, during the Moscow seminar. He characterized the modern Russian culture as not integrated, fragmentary, and multi-styled, in many ways similar to the American culture. He told his colleagues from various countries who came to the seminar about the Russian painter Fomin, whom he called the best of the best. Thanks to Boguslawski, a museum in Florida learned about the art of the lubok master and its board of directors decided to organize two exhibitions of his works, in 2006 and 2008.
ECHOES OF KALEVALA
In 2004, unexpectedly for us, a “boom” of Fomin’s Kalevala started. Tens of articles about the series were published in England, Finland, and Russia. A large London publishing house printed the encyclopedia World Mythology with an article about Kalevala and an illustration by Fomin. Later, between 2004 and 2008, the books by Finnish, Russian, and American publishers appeared, with illustrations from Fomin’s paintings. Moreover, a tourist catalogue A Journey through Karelia came out, and it resembled an album of painting reproductions more than a tourist brochure.
Banks and various enterprises started issuing calendars with Fomin’s works. The International Red Cross of Finland, with permission granted by the governing body of this international organization, every year published thousands of images portraying the heroes of Fomin’s Kalevala to gather donations for the Fund of Assistance to the Victims of Disasters.
In April 2004, Fomin had a charitable exhibition in the offices of the Finnish Red Cross in the city of Joensuu. The paintings were displayed in a huge room, which served as a blood donation station for the African children dying of AIDS. The Art Museum of Joensuu acquired a painting from the exposition. The press wrote that the money donated during the show was sent to the needy.
Fomin was invited to be a juror in various prestigious biennale in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and abroad. In May, 2005, he was asked to chair the project called the International Cultural Marathon – Mosaic of Kalevala. He declined, claiming that an artist should do only one thing – paint pictures. However, asked by the organizers, he agreed to give a presentation to pupils at a school.
Had there been no ‘Kalevala’ by E. Lönnrot, the world would not have learned about the epic ‘Lord of the Rings’, as J. R. R. Tolkien admitted, Fomin told the youngsters who were copying his paintings. But even had there been no Akseli Gallen-Kallela, my ‘Kalevala’ would have appeared regardless. I painted it as no one had before me and no one will do again. People link ‘Kalevala’ to Finland rather than to Karelia. In this sense our advertising is inferior. Perhaps we are more interested in profit than in investment. We should do exactly what the Finns do – honor the real, living ideas, talented masters, and support the inspired projects based on ‘Kalevala’. I am dreaming about a ‘Kalevala Brotherhood,’ with membership consisting of creative individuals and businessmen, but I am afraid that this is too difficult for our officials. I would like to see a ballet, an opera or a play based upon ‘Kalevala’ in any country, with stage design based on the motifs from my works. I am exploring an idea for a media-show, ‘Kalevala-Jazz,’ with Finnish and Russian jazz musicians and accompanied by the projected images from my series. Fomin had fought for some time for the creation of brand equality between Finland and the poetic Mecca of E. Lönnrot, Karelia.
At the initiative of the General Consulate of Norway in St. Petersburg during the Days of Norwegian Culture in Karelia, the creator of Peer Gynt and Tales of the North series opened an exhibition of children’s drawings entitled Once Upon a Time There Were Trolls. During the workshop-meeting with the students of the Art School for Children, he said that all great things are created in solitude. Music helps find harmony with the world and oneself and, therefore, supports the solitude, charging it with inspiration.
My ‘Tales of the North,’ he revealed to the students, were created while listening to Grieg, Halvorsen, Svendsen, Hanssen, Sinding, and other Norwegian composers. Russian readers are not very familiar with the works of Asbjørnsen and Moe because their tales are rarely published; they cannot be found in bookstores or even in libraries. We are all citizens of the material world, in which it is easy to forget about the soul. And yet, the nation’s soul lives in its tales. My highest priority is to take people back to the real magical world.
Fomin’s most cherished dream has been a publication of Norwegian tales with his illustrations, in which the fantastic characters, rich imagination, and the national sense of humor, so close to him, would be brought to life. His illustrations to the Tales of the North succeeded in finding their way to the hearts of Russian-speaking Norwegian viewers who distributed them in their publications. Unexpectedly, we received the news that one of London’s theatres based a poster advertising the staging of Peer Gynt on Fomin’s painting and the Spanish radio station Snail made out of it a vignette for its Internet site.
There were several competitions of amateur artists who embroidered, burnished in wood, wove, and drew images based on the motifs from his series Peer Gynt and Kalevala. Fomin was not afraid of the copyists from various countries, but he was annoyed by those who asked him for his opinion about their plagiarism: To paint the way I do, one needs to be born with my world, filled with so many images and ideas that I will not be able to embody them all to the end of my life.
Fomin made his images available without charge to the Karelian folk music group Mullarit and the Finnish Happoradio, to Korela, the kantele ensemble from St. Petersburg, and to others, to be used as covers of their albums. And in 2007, the National Theatre of Karelia staged a theatrical musical spectacle A Journey to Kalevala, which featured a slide-show of Fomin’s paintings. Matti Vehviläinen, who was specially invited to the celebration, was particularly happy to see the audience stand up to applaud the painter of the pictures.
At the beginning of September, 2005, the Russian Trade Legation in Finland opened its first art exhibition. The show, which included the works from the Kalevala series and other paintings from various series and years, took place in the main hall of the Legation in Helsinki. Heads of state, important officials, and business leaders participated in various venues there. In the two years the exhibition was on display, every visiting statesman was invited to hear a lecture about the art of the modern avant-garde painter and to visit the exposition.
Just before the end of his exhibition at the Trade Legation, visited between 2005 and 2007 by important guests, ranging from presidents and ministers to business leaders from various countries, a joint project of the Finnish Center of Karelian Culture Juminkeko and the Russian publishing house Scandinavia was released, with the financial support of the largest Karelian enterprises. The project was named the Golden Kalevala not only because of the color of the cover but also because the edition could be afforded only by wealthy book collectors. The book came out in Finnish and Russian and featured forty reproductions of Fomin’s paintings, characterized by his synthetic style – a free combination of artistic currents and devices, from lubok to abstraction and ornament.
The artistic achievement of E. Lönnrot, who built from ancient myths, folk legends, and songs a monument to Finland and placed it at the center of historical foundations of world literature, is often compared to the creation of such universal human treasures as the Scandinavian Elder Edda, the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, and the Indian Mahabharata and Ramayana. The Kalevala canvasses, masterpieces of the Finnish classic painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela – treasures of the Finnish National Museum – inspired hundreds of world artists. The epic has been fully translated into sixty languages and partially into one hundred and fifty. Until now, the artists usually illustrated the epic in graphics, with the exception of Gallen-Kallela, who had to win several competitions to be able to complete the Kalevala cycle. Pavel Filonov had to suffer the pressure of Soviet censorship. Thirteen students of his school worked for almost two years on the drawings to the book, which came out in 1933. The author of the introduction and practically the editor of the book was the party official I. Maiskii. Perhaps for that reason in the introduction to the book there was no mention of its illustrations.
Fomin’s Golden Kalevala had better luck. The book’s first presentation took place during the International Congress of Finno-Ugric Writers and the International Economic Forum. Then, in 2006, it became the book of the year in Karelia, winning prizes in various categories and a diploma, For the Best Design. Later, at the 16th annual competition Best Books of the Year, held by the Russian Association of Book Publishers, the Union of Journalists, the Russian Society of Authors, Moscow UNESCO Bureau, and the International Association of Journalists in the conference hall of the Federal Press and Mass Communications Agency, among the six hundred publications from 41 regions of Russia produced by one hundred and sixty-eight publishers, the Golden Kalevala was named the Best Russian Illustrated Gift Publication of 2006. One of the co-sponsors of this nomination was the Cultural Committee of the State Duma of the Russian Federation. The organizers of the competition were united in their assessment that the Golden Kalevala was the vanguard in design because it combined the classic and the neo-primitivist elements.
In February, 2007, the presentation of the most popular Kalevala took place in the Russian Center of Science and Culture at the USA Consulate in Helsinki, attended by hundreds of invited guests, official and public figures. Simultaneously, Fomin’s exhibition of pictures from the Kalevala series was opened. The opening featured speeches given by the Consul of Russia in Finland, A. Rumiantsev, the military attaché of the Russian Federation, V. Bondarenko, the Trade Representative of Russia in Finland, V. Shliamin, as well as diplomats, other artists, and cultural figures. The venue gathered together large audiences of Finns and Russians living in Finland, as well as Russian and foreign journalists.
Only Fomin could not understand why it took eight years for his illustrations (paintings finished in 1998) to turn the new edition of Kalevala, in the opinion of the true lovers of the epic, into a masterpiece. With the publication of the Golden Kalevala, which found its way to all libraries of Russia, among them to the National Library, the Russian readers had their first opportunity to become acquainted with the images created by the artist. One after another, journals, even the prestigious Science in Russia, published by the Russian Academy of Sciences, started printing Fomin’s Kalevala images first and Gallen-Kallela’s and Filonov’s second. According to A. Rumiantsev, the publication of the Golden Kalevala became an event of international significance. Not by chance, the organizers of the book’s unveiling presented to the President of Finland, Tarja Halonen, one of the copies, signed by the translators, the artist, and the publishers.
The pro-rector of the University in Mikkeli, director of the Mikpoli Center of National Technologies, Petri Lintula, suggested to Fomin a month-long university exhibition of works from various series to open on the 22 of March, 2007.
Another movie about Fomin was made in the largest Finnish multimedia center and shown on Finnish Television. It is difficult to find a more grateful public than the university audience, interested in everything unusual. Lintula set for himself the goal of making Vladimir’s Kalevala famous through the new digital technologies. Thus, the celebrated Red Boat with Väinämöinen in it and the Feast in Kalevala were turned into mobile-phone downloadable wallpapers. In May of 2007, Fomin received one more certificate attesting the purchase of his painting (Three Ravens from Peer Gynt series) by the Art Museum in the city of Mikkeli.
From December 2007 to June 2008, Matti Vehviläinen held the permanent exhibition of Kalevala at the Cultural and Recreational Center in the town of Sarkisalmi, located at one of the main highways of the country, to allow the travelers to see the pictures of the famous master.
For many years we were the indispensable guests at the gala evenings organized by the consuls of Finland in St. Petersburg. During one of them – on the occasion of the 90th Anniversary of the Independence of Finland, Fomin suddenly heard from the new Finnish consul, P. Serkio: We’ve been hearing about you for so long that we thought you were very old, but you’re so young!
