воскресенье, 15 апреля 2012 г.

Озера Брене и Жу


Как-то занесло меня в один райский уголок, причем случайно. Здесь параллельно границе с Францией, которая на этом участке идет прямой линией по горам Ризу, привольно раскинулись два швейцарских озера. Меньшее из них называется Брене, а большее — Жу. Разделяет их из узкая полоска земли шириной всего метров сто пятьдесят. Оба водоема расположены на высоте чуть больше тысячи метров над уровнем моря, а потому считаются самыми  высокогорными озерами Швейцарии. Считается, что между ними есть перепад высот в два метра. В Жу впадает, прямо скажу, не самая полноводная река Орб, и уровень воды в озере со временем изменяется значительно. Был я здесь летом, и по по обнажившемуся дну можно определить, что Жу «усыхает» как минимум на полтора метра. Потом, когда по практически безлюдной набережной Сюр-ле-Ке я дошел до перешейка, обнаружил подтверждение своей оценке: углубленный «фарватер», по которому избыток воды отводится в Брене, был густо усеян лежащими на боку яркими буйками, привязанными полутораметровыми тросами.  А вот уже из Брене сток воды идет через землю. Рекомендую пройтись вдоль берегов Брене, полюбоваться всеми возможными оттенками изумруда и лазури, а если будет время - то и взобраться на гору, подышать свежайшим прохладным воздухом, напоенным тонким смолянистым ароматом хвои…


На иллюстрациях (слева направо)
1 - Озеро Жу. Видна набережная Сюр-ле-Ке.
2 - Вид с вершины горы на оба озера.
3 - Озеро Брене.

суббота, 14 апреля 2012 г.

Kateryna Bilokur

Farmer’s Field. 1949.
When Pablo Picasso, who was not very generous in lavishing praise on others, saw some paintings by Kateryna Bilokur, a painter from a small Ukrainian village with no formal art education, at a 1957 exhibition in Paris, he exclaimed: “She's a genius! Her works must be made known to all the world!”
Kateryna Bilokur was born more than a hundred years ago in the village of Bohdanivka, Kyiv Region. She lived her first twenty four years without ever leaving Bohdanivka, and when finally one day she ventured out she was completely overwhelmed by what she saw: locomotives, like metal monsters vomiting billows of smoke and steam; huge buildings of the kind never seen before, milling crowds in the streets; wondrous wagons rolling on the roads all by themselves, with no horses or oxen pulling them - this strange and somewhat frightening world outside the native village had made a lasting impression upon the young woman. She lived a life of six decades but her trips "to the big world" were few and far between, and were always regarded as "important events."
Dahlias, or Flowers and Viburnum. 1940.
She lived in her parents’ peasant house doing all the chores a peasant woman was supposed to do, but whenever she had some time to spare she devoted it to painting. She did not have any formal education at all. She learnt to read and write when still very young all by herself, and her parents decided she was literate enough and did not let her have any more schooling. Kateryna taught herself to paint and mastered the technique of painting without any help or advice from professional artists.
Gradually, her works became known in Kyiv. They were duly appreciated. During her lifetime, they were shown at exhibitions in Moscow and in Paris. Many of her paintings made their way to museums. She was given all kinds of awards and titles, she was invited time and again to come to live in Kyiv, she was offered a good studio to work in, but she stubbornly declined all such offers and invitations, and continued to live in her native village, in the house that her father had built. She took good care of it, whitewashing the walls, decorating it, keeping it clean and in good repair. After her death in 1961, the house was turned into a memorial museum.
Breakfast. 1950.
It is a small house. You have to watch your head when you enter, because the lintel is low. The bigger room can accommodate just a few people at a time, and the smaller one that was used by the painter, as a studio is really tiny. Now it is hard for a foreign visitor to understand how a house of such a size could be a home for so many people: Bilokur’s parents, her brother and his wife with five children, and she herself, they all lived there at one time or another sharing the limited space.
Bilokur refused to let anyone into her studio - not only her relatives and neighbours who did not appreciate her strange, senseless hobby, but also visitors from the capital, art critics and art dealers who came to have a look at her works and purchase them. Probably, she was a bit ashamed to show her sanctum to important guests, fearing their negative reaction to the small size and lack of furniture in her studio.
Now you can see there an easel, little table, small bench, bookshelf with books and a bunch of brushes in an earthen jug, several dozens of them. They were made by Bilokur herself, finely crafted. When she could afford to buy factory-made ones, she did not because she found them too coarse and not suitable for her work.
Flowers Beyond the Fence. 1935.
Her studio is so small she could take only a couple of steps back to look at her painting on the easel from some distance away.
Though the artist herself thought she painted "just flowers" which always grew in profusion around her house, there is much more in her paintings than floral representations. There is something enigmatic in them, a call to visit the unknown. Bilokur loved flowers, wild and cultivated, she planted them in her backyard and never cut them — she said that to cut a flower is to immediately kill it. She did not hesitate to portray flowers of different seasons in one and the same painting, because she transformed them into magic images that exist beyond time and space. For her, creation of beauty was not regulated by the actuality of the here and now.
Her paintings are meticulously executed, every little detail is very carefully painted, no two flowers look alike, but through this figurativeness you can glean something that suggests the presence of worlds, other than ours. As an artist said looking at Bilokur's paintings: “She paints dreams about flowers, rather than flowers themselves.”
Portrait of the Artist’s Nieces. 1939.
Mostly, they are happy dreams. She eschewed using black paints even for making underpainting. She tended to use what she called lucid hues. Only several of her self-portraits she painted using only black and white paints. For her the drudgery of everyday monotonous reality was tragically black and stood in a stark contrast to the multicolored dreams of her other paintings.

суббота, 7 апреля 2012 г.

Древнеисландская сага и Украина?

Мало кто знает, что действие второй части древнеисландской «Саги о Хервёр и Хейдреке», которая датируется тринадцатым веком и основана на гораздо более древних материалах, происходит на территории современной Украины, в Приднепровье! В саге описано эпическое сражение гуннов с готами. У готов было собственное государство Ойум, столица которого — Археймаррасполагалась на Днепре. Специалисты утверждают, что из-за отсутствия письменных источников сейчас невозможно указать точное местонахождение Археймара, но в качестве вариантов рассматриваются Киев, Хортица или Каховка. Если верить сказанию, рядом со столицей, на границе с гуннами, находился таинственный лес Мирквид. По одной из версий, он соотносится с Меотскими болотами в месте впадения Дона в Азовское море. Но здесь есть три возражения. Во-первых, болота в дельте реки — это не лес. Во-вторых, от Днепра до устья Дона совсем неблизкий путь, а в саге лес находился рядом со столицей. И в-третьих, одни  историки считают, что готы занимали только правобережье Днепра, а другие — что территориально Ойум и Гилея (левый берег Днепра в его нижнем течении) одно и то же. Лично мне в обоих случаях нравится одно: Хортица и дубравы идеально соответствуют описанию Археймара, который в переводе как раз и обозначает «речной дом». У археологов Ойум во многом ассоциируется с черняховской культурой, впервые открытой на территории Украины. Но об этом мы поговорим чуть позже.
 
На иллюстрациях:
1 - Картина норвежского художника XIX века Петера Николая Арбо «Гизур и гунны». Готский вождь вызывает гуннов на бой. Обратите внимание на типичный степной пейзаж: поросшие камышом берега речушки справа и дубравы на горизонте.
2, 3 - Мирквид. Фотосъемка 2008 г. Современные остатки пойменных дубрав. Чем не сказочный лес?