Igor Avramenko

IGOR AVRAMENKO BIOGRAPHY

I was born in 1964 in Baku in a family of a portrait painter. When I was a

kid all the relatives presented me with art implements only: paper, pencils,
paints. I remember that before starting to draw I tasted everything,
watercolors turned out to be sweet. Later I learned that honey was added in
them for tenacity.

My father commissioned portraits, often they were dull faces of Soviet
government officials, but sometimes he painted ordinary people who lived in
the Caucasus Mountains. They put on their national costumes, national fur
caps, felt cloaks, and on their belts hung holsters and daggers in silver
sheath. They were most colorful bobby-dazzlers, I liked them a lot and I was
allowed to paint in their clothes and cold steel.

From 1971 to 1979 I studied at art school. There we studied classical
canons, composition, drawing, watercolor. We painted fruit and ate them
after the lesson. Later the teacher brought plaster casts and we painted
them.

In 1980 I entered the State Art College. It was the oldest art educational
institution in Baku. It was very interesting to study there. The only thing
I did not like was anatomy. We studied this discipline in detail as if we
studied in medical college.

At that time the art got to mean very much to me, it became the meaning of
my life.

Most of the students lived poorly. We spent for paints our scholarship and
money we got for casual employment. One day I wanted to buy an expensive
album of Vincent Van Gogh and to earn the necessary amount of money
I went to the seaport to unload fish in huge boxes. Strong dockers came to
have a look and made fun of an artist who was covered with fish scales from
head to foot and tried to move a huge box. I earned nothing except pain in
the back, but was presented with a big fish.

We often went to plein air and painted the city. Baku is one of the most
beautiful and picturesque cities in the world. It is a mixture of Paris,
Naples and Istanbul. It is situated at the border of Europe and Asia, here
lots of cultural traditions join and mix. In the old part of the city on the

shore of the Caspian Sea there is a medieval tower - Giz-Galasy a ziggurat
of fire-worshippers. We often climbed on the very top of it to paint the
bay. There blew a wind so strong that canvases fluttered off the painter's
case. The canvas quivered in the wind so much that we could make only
abstract paintings or art in the style on pointillism. Van Gogh went to
Arles to paint the luxurious nature of the South, Paul Gauguin left for
Polynesia to paint the unexplored wild nature and find paradise on earth.
And inspired by their art, we went to the Apsheron Peninsula to paint olive
groves, cypresses, rocks and seashore. It was our paradise on earth.

The golden time and joy of creation ended in 1985. From 1985 to 1986 I did
military service. I could not paint for a long time after this. I was damped
by the brutality of people. Now I knew that death was behind us all the time
and the world did not seem so beautiful and careless any longer.

I got a job in a musical theater and painted playbills for performances.
Hand-painted advertisements are very expensive and it takes several days to

make some of them. I also made sceneries and properties. After working in
the theater I felt the load off my mind, I painted ballet dancers and
singers like Edgar Degas. Having earned some money in the theater I rented
an art studio, bought paints and canvases and continued my creative
development. I painted much.

At that time there were no private art galleries in the country, only state
ones and to exhibit art in them an artist had to paint not want he wanted
but what was required by the authorities. I could not sell my art, I did not
want to paint nonsense and to be lead by the nose by idiots, and I could
not pay for my studio.

I left for the Apsheron Peninsula, found an empty house in the oil field and
moved my paintings, books, paints and my cat there. It was a small oasis in
the sand desert stuck with oil derricks and bulk oil tanks. It was a
mysterious view, especially at night. I heard enigmatic sounds all the time.

My friends helped me to redecorate the house, but the roof still leaked.
When it rained my cat and me sat on the bed and listened to the rain
concert. I painted much and was happy. There grew fruit trees near my
house - apricots, persimmons, mulberry trees, grapes. In the morning I rode
a bicycle to the sea for fishing. My life resembled the one of the character
of a well-known book "Walden or Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau.

However, sometimes I saw people. From time to time my friends came to see
me and brought paints, tea and sweets. And I met a guy who lived nearby in
an empty hangar and grew mushrooms for sale in it. He was a drug addict
and I suspected that he grew not only mushrooms there. He lent me a harpoon
gun.

I lived for more than a year like this and have fond memories of that time.
The political situation in the country changed and I moved to Moscow. At
that time there appeared private

art galleries and art business began to
develop.

My paintings were bought for the first time after 7 years of creative life
and now everything I painted was bought. I rented a large studio in a
prestigious district and bought a house near to the sea in Crimea. Everything
went well but after a time I realized that I could not paint any longer, the
inspiration had gone. I understood that being an artist is not a profession,
but an especial state, special way of life and absolute comfort kills the
feelings. I sold the house and decided to go to New York. My friend Mikhail
Khodgayants lived in California at that time and we agreed to meet in the
Kennedy airport.

We rented a studio in Brooklyn at Sheepshead Bay. Sheepshead Bay is a
neighborhood in southeastern Brooklyn, overlooking an ocean inlet of the
same name to its south and bordered to the north by Marine Park, to the east
by Shell Bank Creek, to the south by Manhattan Beach, and to the west by

Gravesend. In the 1980s and 1990s, the city developed plans for Sheepshead
Bay that provided for the improvement of the piers, private residential and
retail construction, an esplanade along Emmons Avenue. There was
considerable settlement in the neighborhood and its environs by immigrants
from the Soviet Union, China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Israel, the
Philippines, Poland, and Guyana.

We met lots of very interesting people from different countries there. We
painted all day long and in the evening walked along the quay or drunk cheap
Californian wine. New York is a wonderful city. I got to love Long Island,
Greenwich Village, Broadway,Soho, and the Central Park. For some time we
painted, but did not show the fruit of our effort to anyone and then we took
it to Soho. At that time there were many galleries there, I believe about
500. I fondly hoped that gallery owners would like my paintings at once, but
everything turned out to be more complicated. They suggested that we send
them slides. What is the need for slides - I asked, here are my paintings.
But they only smiled. It is common here. I believe that if even Leonardo da

Vinci had come to them, they would have told him: "Please bring the slides
of your Mona Lisa, may be one time we will have a look at them.

An abstract painter, who had his art hung on the fence, said that it was
useless to try and we should not waste our time for prestigious galleries,
and our neighbor who was a barber suggested that we should find a job at a
nearby gas station. But I thought that it would be more pleasant to jump
from Brooklyn Bridge once than to fill up cars every day. And I told my
friend that if it had been so difficult to get in a prestigious gallery, we
should try to get into a most prestigious one. We selected the most
presentable street of New York - the 5th Avenue and found a gallery that was
situated in a most beautiful skyscraper - Trump Tower. It was a gallery of
Norman Krider. He worked with Russian art of the early 20th century.On the
walls there hung artworks by Chagall, Larionov, Goncharova, Kandinskiy and
other avant-garde artists. I showed him my gouache paintings and he was

ecstatic. He bought 3 works at once and after it we successfully worked
together for 3 years.

I will remember this man all my life. I believe there are very few
gallerists with such a refined taste and such a tender attitude to art. He
was very successful and well-known in art business and with all that
absolutely everyone loved him. It is a very rare case.

New York is a city of great opportunities that affects an artist very much.
It is a very urban environment and its influence is rational, structural and
conceptual. But I was interested in the irrational side of art, in
metaphys
In 1995 my dream came true. I arrived to San Diego to my friend Mikhail and
we went to Mexico from there. We started in Tijuana and moved along the
ocean going deep into the deserted mountainous districts of Northern Mexico.
There live the descendants of Maya for whom the color was sacral. Life after
death was as important to them as real life and by means of color they

showed their attitude to the metaphysical world. I learned much from them.

Later on we went to Mexico several years on end to get new impressions,
inspiration and experience. My favorite funk-hole was a small fishing
village Popotla situated near the town of Rosarita. It is an ideal place for
everyone who wants to feel the taste of virginal nature without straying too
far from civilization. I paint it from memory until now. The air there
smells of fish and seaweed, and wind is always blowing from the ocean.
There lived an old fisherman Juan, who reminded me of a character of the
story by E. Hemingway "Old Man and the Sea". He called us 'Muscovite'
and promised to teach us fishing if we stayed for permanent living in Popotla.

Traveling became my passion, but nowhere - in Paris, Greece or Ireland I
experienced feelings so strong as in Mexico, Arizona, Nevada in desolate
places where a man has not subjected the nature to him, but tries to adapt
himself to it. It gets very clear here how delicate human subsistence and
how defenseless the beauty are.
ics. I read many books by American psychedelic authors, ones by
Carlos Castaneda among them and decided that what I needed was to go to
Mexico and to develop my creative ideas there. I dreamed of seeing exquisite
deserted landscapes, which make you sink in a special state of confluence
with nature.

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