Nadezda writes, “When people walk by my paintings, I want them to feel as if they walked by a mirror hanging on the wall and stop in their tracks, recognizing the familiar.” The familiar may not be a well-known landscape or a figure experiencing something we’ve experienced. It may be something with which we don’t know we’re familiar.
Hidden Currents, oil on canvas, 40 x 30"
The doors in her painting Secret Hallway are doors we may not wish to open. If we did, however, we might find the familiar. “The worlds concealed behind the doors refer to the substratum of the conscious,” she says, “the hidden world that is located off our rational radar. In my current work, I explore the ways to get access to that dimension and bring it to the surface through various creative media.”
Sagittarius A, oil on canvas, 24 x 30"
Recently, she performed an experiment. “I approached the blank canvas with little or no idea of what the narrative is going to be, what worlds and characters will come to populate it,” she says. “It made me feel that embracing the uncertainty can be not just scary and intimidating, but also a most invigorating and freeing sensation.”
Swimming Club, oil on canvas, 28 x 22"
Secret Hallway, oil on canvas, 48 x 48"
In theater, there is the concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief.” An audience knows what it is seeing on the stage is artifice but chooses to pretend it isn’t. Nadezda and her family performed plays based on fairy tales in a local theater when she was growing up in Russia. “Within an hour of the performance, as an actor,” she explains, “I could transport into a completely different world, be a different character or creature. The sets, the lights, the props, the music—it was as close as it gets to traveling to parallel dimensions and coming back enriched with a creative experience, filling the senses with joy and wonder of the imaginary world. Picture yourself as a viewer sitting in your theater seat, which is indoors, part of the theater building, yet the scene on stage is set in a completely different location—a magical garden, a palace plaza, an enchanted forest. You suddenly exist in two worlds at once.”
Nadezda draws from the “substratum of the conscious” sparked by archetypal images and the writings of her favorite Russian authors. “They inspired me greatly,” she explains, “and showed the innumerable possibilities of transforming the mundane into fantastical by the power of imagination.”
Her recent paintings will be shown in the exhibition Secret Hallway: Nadezda, February 12 through March 4, at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco. —
Modern Eden Gallery
1100 Sutter Street • San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 956-3303 • www.moderneden.com
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