Already on September 20, the preview of the young art fair blazar will take place at the Museum of Moscow!
We continue our segment with Danil Dage — a young artist from Saint Petersburg, who primarily works in painting and graphic techniques. Danil's works are characterized by rich coloration, contrast building, and naivety. The artist will present works created during his stay in different countries — the geography of this visual chronicle covers cities such as Saint Petersburg, Yerevan, Tbilisi, and Tel Aviv.
This time the interview took place via video call between Saint Petersburg and Tel Aviv. We asked Danila to share photos of his favorite places and talked about how a new country changes one's perception of color, why still life is his favorite genre, and what he would do if he weren't an artist.
Right now I'm in Tel Aviv, and I got here by a rather complicated route: first to Armenia for a month, then to Istanbul. I tried to live in Istanbul, but I didn't like it because it's very noisy and crowded. I basically fled from there to Georgia. I lived there for a while, and then decided to go to Israel, to my roots.
Here I met a girl who works with an art community, integrates incoming artists, organizes events, and curates exhibitions. Then I got involved in subletting a studio that I share with her and a local expressionist painter. Due to moving around, it's hard to work at home. I could eventually set up a space for myself, but since I'm constantly moving, I never get around to doing it. In Tbilisi, I worked from home in a huge Stalin-era apartment, but here in Israel, everything is either small or expensive.
We all come from childhood. My mom used to draw, but thanks to me, she didn't become a professional artist. As a child, I didn't like drawing, I wasn't drawn to it at all. I liked other people's drawings. In elementary school, you pick the coolest notebook, and the most important thing in it is the picture on the cover. I had a mug with four faces showing different emotions. I wanted to get that picture. I took the mug, a piece of paper, and went to my mom.
I said to her: "Draw these faces for me on a piece of paper." And she said: "Why, if you can just copy it." She didn't teach me, but explained what to pay attention to in order to redraw the drawing. I really liked redrawing because I could see in advance what the result should be.
I never went to art school or any courses or clubs. Between the ages of 20 and 25, I had the thought that I wanted to hang a painting in my home. I bought a canvas and painted for about a month. Now I realize that even then I had determined my direction for myself: I started with figurative art—it was a portrait of a woman against a background of lavender fields.
I drew what I came up with in my head. When I finished and hung it up, I liked so much that it was me who drew it, that I bought another canvas. After 2-3 years, I found myself in a moment when I realized that I had been sitting at the canvas for the fourth hour and doing this for a month in a row. I understood how much I had gotten into it.
This happened in a completely unobtrusive way. I always follow the same rule that I heard from the rap group "Triagrutrika" from Chelyabinsk: "If you want to be someone - be that someone." This phrase has built half of my life. If you want to be a dancer, then it's enough for you to just dance and you are already a dancer. And whether you're good or bad - that's a completely different question.
And so I overcame in myself the feeling that I can't draw because I don't have an education.
My grandmother really loved flowers. At our dacha during her lifetime, we had up to 20 different varieties of phlox in various shades. When I was a child, I didn't really like it, but around the age of 17, I fell in love with flowers. I understood how to look at them. When I paint a still life with flowers, everything about them becomes clear to me, I get chill and enjoyment.
It's like drinking tea—you've had it a million times, there are plenty of other drinks, but you keep drinking tea and enjoying it. I paint still lifes to unwind, to relax. It's therapy against burnout.
I want to remind people that art should, first and foremost, be beautiful. The artist is responsible for what they draw the viewer's attention to and for what they try to cultivate and awaken in a person through their works.
I'm not saying that my art is beautiful and it's the standard of what I want, but I'm trying to strive for that. Through familiar images and plots, I try to show simple things that seem ordinary to everyone, but in fact they are very important. Because that's life. In simplicity lies something important.
I get really embarrassed by the word "project." It seems to me that this word is absolutely not about me. A project depends exclusively on the space with which one needs to interact. For example, I can come to one gallery and see beautiful white walls, while in another there will be an old space with unique transitions from an architectural point of view.
I do projects very rarely. Probably the only one is the exhibition in the Yerevan Botanical Garden in a half-destroyed, functioning greenhouse. There was a space, and I had to play with it.
My dream is an exhibition in a space with high ceilings and columns. Not necessarily straight-up luxury, but something similar to the halls of St. Petersburg. I would like to hang there a series of huge graphic works depicting women. It's exclusively about love and pleasant feelings that are on the border with sex, but it's not sex.
I want to settle down somewhere, I'm very tired of traveling. I want to sit somewhere for a few years, to calm down. I'd like to go to Portugal, I was there for a month and I absolutely loved it — the narrow streets and stairs, the atmosphere of the Middle Ages and romance, where nothing has been destroyed because none of the modern wars took place there.
Right now I need to somehow get into the information field, because, so to speak, nobody knows me here. At the moment, I'm drawing dogs for an exhibition in a shop and wine bar in the center of Tel Aviv. We thought it would be cool to have an exhibition in this place, since it's the heart of the hangout spot and people love to gather there.
The main idea of the event is that people come with their pets and I sketch right at the opening. For all the time I've been here, I've never seen a single stray dog. Every other person has their own pet, and they're all different: purebred and mixed breed. Especially on weekends - it's some kind of madness, everyone is always with dogs: both on the street and in cafes. It's literally a dog town here. That's awesome.
When I often see a certain breed near me, it strongly influences my drawing. For example, when I started drawing my dog Balu (she is smooth-coated, even, and round), my drawings looked like her. Now Dasha, with whom we rent our studio, has a small, hairy dog that looks like a Giant Schnauzer.
It just so happened that I started drawing shaggy dogs, there are too many of them here. The more I notice one breed, the more I see how this breed differs from others in terms of mood. I don't have a task to draw exactly what I see in reality. I have a task to look, step back a little, and capture a primitive perception of the subtleties of the object I'm depicting.
I really love the old part of the city of Jaffa. There stand Arab houses with arches and small windows on narrow streets. When I walk there, I manage to transport myself with the help of imagination to ancient times.
I also have a favorite park where jackals run around. They are timid and don't approach people. In the evening, they come out and start howling, or rather, screaming. I thought there were about 40 of them there. It was the first time I heard them and I thought it was people, because birthdays are often celebrated there, and they have barbecues. Jackals are completely harmless, no one pays attention to them.
You learn something everywhere, notice new things. I feel that a place changes me only after I leave it. For example, I left Georgia and realized how much I loved the local tomatoes.
Israel influenced me in the most powerful way, it's a completely different world. Here I finally saw the color blue that I had never seen before - vibrant, real, rich, and self-sufficient. Here the weather is constantly the same, there are no clouds and the sky is blue.
I often get fixated on a certain color: before, I used to go with a green-red combination, but nowadays I mainly use orange and light blue. I've always favored the medium canvas size of 150x100 cm. Due to traveling, I've had to scale down. My current standard size is 70x50 cm.
I hate working on small details, my hands shake and I get irritated, during such work everything annoys me. I got a couple of projects measuring 15x20 cm. I started to fit everything I need into such a small format.
My answer is always the same - work very hard. You have to keep working and don't need to wait until you get used to the place. It seems to me that the easiest thing is to fall out of the routine, and the most difficult thing is to catch the moment when you're falling, so you don't fall completely.
When I arrived in Yerevan, on the very first day I went to buy a canvas, a couple of brushes, and some paint. In Turkey it was the same, in Georgia it was the same, and here too. It's something habitual, where I can shut myself off and protect myself from new difficulties.
I'm madly fond of Maxim Savva's works from Petersburg — the last romantic of the city. And Kostya Gorelov from Moscow, who now lives in Spain. He's the kind of person who no longer exists. Kostya creates paintings reminiscent of the Renaissance: he mixes oil with varnish, all his paintings are translucent. Kostya paints naked men: athletic, elegant, complex. He's our Michelangelo, very few people do this kind of work.
I also really like how Alena Rakova draws flowers.
I worked as a gardener for several years in the Botanical Garden of St. Petersburg. This job suits me very well.
First of all, it's manual labor. Second, you always see the results of your work. Third, it's insanely beautiful. I really like to beautify ugly places. I would probably go back to working as a gardener.
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