Solo show Everyday Masculinity 

Upper Gallery, Mūkusla Art Salon, November 22 –December 29, 2012

It was a sleepy summer evening in Druviena, when I heard the words “everyday masculinity” on Latvian Radio 1. They were uttered by Latvian poet Knuts Skujenieks when answering the journalist’s cheerful question - how should we all live together today here in Latvia?

Thus I got the title for the series of 14 paintings, created in 2012. “Everyday Masculinity” for me is a second attempt to examine the family issues. It is the ability (at times, total inability) to think calmly about my grandma, whose nine children did not want to (and could not) stay in the house built by my granddad, and not to sneer at the brothers-in-law who somehow always end up in the front row in all the family pictures. “Everyday Masculinity” is an attempt to abolish the division in male and female once and for all, as this division does not really lead anywhere. It helps to understand little, it rather veils something. I cannot seem to deal with the superb fact that my grandmother was Anna Rozentāle,  A WOMAN, mother of nine.

Obviously, it determined the framework of her life, but then - what? Was there anything more?

And, of course, I understand the difficulties that are encountered when depicting a living being, a real person (regardless, if it has died many years ago). Something in them resists my naive urge to record, to paint, to preserve their traces at all costs. It will always be something else, and never who they really were.

In her unfinished autobiography “Moments of Being” Virginia Woolf wrote: “One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting small, passing at different rates of speed [..]. That is what is indescribable, that is what makes all images too static [..].” – and I have no reason not to believe her.