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| Sunday, 23 May 2004 |
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In love with wood An exhibition of wood art opened at the Alliance Francaise de Kandy on Friday, and continues till May 28. The artist Olga Dimitri has been living in Kandy since 1993. She describes below how she came to produce these unusual works of art.
Kandy influenced me a great deal. When I came to live on my husband's tea estate close to that city in '93, I was overwhelmed. Kandy is truly spiritual, without any of the new age nonsense. Paranormal activity, rich culture, a strong diversity of religious influence, both good and bad; a very mystic atmosphere in general. You can imagine what all this is like after the cold and bleak concrete metropolis, Moscow. And of course, staying at the estate was incredibly self-revealing. Nature was all around and that always helps you to reconnect with your true self. I began experimenting with wood in those early days when I lived on the estate. I began doing that when I discovered many wooden planks, corroded by termites, on one of the long-unused floors in my husband's factory. This intensified those incredible patterns, tones and colour gradations on wood that always so greatly fascinated me. Soon after this discovery, Dr. Dimitri, my husband, removed several of these planks for me to work on. And there it began. When I moved into Colombo, about a year later, the concept was swept away by other things, and it was only several years later that I started getting into it again, exploring it in a variety of ways. At present, it is the principle medium of what I do. As to the idea behind this whole project-well-first of all, as I have already mentioned, staying at the tea estate expose me to nature a lot. It deeply inspired me and so I wanted to do something that could represent the experience of being connected with nature. It's a family trait, I guess, this longing for nature. My father and grandfather were famous agriculturists. My husband connects to nature through his scientific exploration of tea plants. My sons, Andrey and Nikolai, connect through whitewater rafting and adventure tour guiding. For myself, I discovered wood to be the best representative for this experience of natural reconnection. Wood is universal to nature. It contains all the forces of nature within itself. Instead of focusing on carving pieces of wood into something, or using them merely as a foundation for a painting, I began doing things to expose the natural state of the wood. In other words, I use paint and sometimes woodcarving techniques in order to highlight what is already there. Paint is the background; wood is the foreground. As an old proverb says 'nature is the best artist'; it only needs some publicity, which is what I do. A lot of influence came from the so-called group Zero which, to badly oversimplify, was a 60s art movement in Germany that focused on representing natural forces through colour alone, especially monochrome. Their manifesto was 'zero is silence; zero is the beginning; zero is round; zero rotates'. You can say the same thing about wood. It is something fundamental and essential. I would not call my work minimalist, although it certainly is very Zen because of how I try to absorb the observer into the experience of nature. I try to make each painting, each composition into a little door that opens up for the observer a different world, a world so easily lost in our frantic urban lives. - Olga Dimitri. |
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| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
I was always obsessed with wood. I become entranced just looking at it,
not to mention working with it. Even my first memory is related to wood.
It is a memory of falling in love with an old wooden wall, its tarnished
logs, their blackened patterns weaving into untold epics. And it loved me
back. I just stood there, gaping, transfixed by our love. It's one of
those moments that last forever. I see infinity when I look at wood.
