My way to calligraphy
First of all, I am a poet. I was writing, declaiming and singing my poems in theatre performances between France and Russia, in Paris and Moscow. During one of the shows inspired by the performances of Russian futurist poets of the early 20th century, we decided to hold a facetious auction of my writings. The aim of the joke was not really profit but I thought of the way to make my poetry visual, make it an art object. Thus I began to draw my poems first in monochrome, then full-colour, making a sequence of paintings which would successively form up the poem and which I later called “poem-paintings”. These works are designed as pictures which can be viewed without penetration into their profound meaning, but they all are based upon the words of poems which have become (or have become again) the images, because an image always anticipates speech in one’s consciousness …
I don’t know if I am really a calligrapher. I didn’t get the proper education but I hear a voice in me which prompts the lines and curves of letters and colours which I think reflect best the images that appear in my head when I write my poems. Thus, every word gives birth to some music and when the colours from my dreams join the verbal dance, the divine light comes down… Let my poetry be the colour, and the colours be the synthesis of my dreams and my poems, let there be light. The word of a poet willing to recreate the universe from the chaos, so that in the Eternity his words would become shades, the kingdom of light and shade, where the calligraphic word written in black would decorate the Silence of a blank sheet and make it meaningful…
