I'm pretty sure my grandfather, who came from a tiny village south east of L'viv, fought, on the Austrian side, in this battle. This "Lubok" poster (part of a series, there are LOC copies with originals lodged at the British Museum) conveys something of the ghastliness and confusion of the battle.

And I'm pretty sure my grandmother, from another village not many miles from my grandfather's, was also engaged--as a child hidden, for months, in a barn with her older sister Takla and younger brother for conpany (neither of her siblings survived the war).

This poster series is titled "ВОЙНА РОССIИ сб НЫМЦАМИ"--Russia's War Against the Germans. But this gives the modern reader little idea of the national identity of those who were actually engaged on the Austro-Hungarian side in this conflict. Many of the soldiers (my grandfather included) were local conscripts.

I don't know a lot about this conflict; it's certainly never going to be a central study piece on my desk. But today I was looking for architectural records of the area. And what I found instead... were images of war.

First I saw the "German" side. It feels like, circa 1914, the Germans (Austrians) were ahead of the game when it came to sending photographers to their battlefronts. And then the Russian side's images. My grandfather was a prisoner of war during this period. He was not well-treated. I look at the pictures with the outdated helmets and the dazed prisoners walking through unpaved village streets

And I feel sorry. And I hope, I utterly hope, not to experience this displacement in my own life, in that of my kids or, well really, nobody wants to experience war in their own fields, on their own soil.

 A small body of work in painting tunes to something in my own body and sparks an emotional/physical response. I had that just yesterday, and, unusually (for me), it was for once easy, easy, easy to understand why that connection had sparked.

This painting by Rusu Ciobanu reminded me so strongly of my mother's work. There is the Eastern European element, for sure, and although the brushwork here is harder, or harsher, than my mom's, immediately on seeing this portrait, I knew this artist had worked this painting just as my mother would have done, in a studio with her subject in front of her, looking at and intuitively adjusting proportion and color, and winnowing away the extraneous details.

I love the marginally small, intense head, the big sensuous hands. The dead (possibly) Soviet architecture outside the window. I would love to talk to my mother about this painting, and see what she thinks. Unfortunately that conversation has no longer been an option, not since May of 2018.

Last year, Rusu Ciobanu's family still had her with them for those conversations (even though cataracts have long past cut short her painting life). There's a substantive article in the Calvert Journal (elements of which seem scrounged from this Romanian-language piece at Scena9) which touches through the major arcs of her life and art career.  I'm not surprised to feel the additional detail I've learned slotting into my mental landscape, locking down my interest in both her life and paining. This is an artist who has lived through "interesting times": A 19th century manqué Romanian rural childhood; the transition to portraiture of the Soviet collectives of the 1960s. And then, mature intellectual rebellion as she cemented her home in Chișinău, Moldova's capital city, hosted the Moldovan equivalent of a salon--a hidden, artful garden, within the concrete city--and began producing portraits of the artists and intellectuals of that grouping.

So--2020 was Valentina Rusu Ciobanu's centennial. Retired now, and living still in her secluded Chișinău home, she roused herself for the interviews and retrospective public attention of a world of art that came knocking at her door, belatedly, with a fresh world of change. What does a 100 year old person think about her art? Her "playful potraiture," as one modern reviewer described it?

A fair amount, it would seem, about a past, and a life, that was so sharply cut away from her by the geopolitics of the 1940s. "She paints like a fox," an admirer observes. Through her paintings, her harmless old lady comments twist under the weight of now long past decades of Soviet oppression. "People are all the same,” she says, on her centenary. But what really do those words mean?

Her son, Lică Sainciuc, comments that she has always been a story teller, describing the time that he, and she, spied a horse-drawn sleigh as they walked together in town. "Let's take it," she told him. "Who knows when we'll see another one."

The portrait above left, of her neighbor, was not the spontaneous moment of observation we think we see. To create this portrait, Rusu Ciobanu borrowed traditional Romanian-style clothes from a local museum. She did not stop there. Rusu Ciobabu wore the outfit herself to a Soviet-run artists' conference in Kyiv. To Rusu Ciobabu, the clothes were not museum pieces. They were part of something, in Soviet Moldova, that was at risk of vanishing. For wearing these 'historical' clothes, she was formally rebuked. 

One translation of her centenary exhibition has the title "Valentina Rusu Ciobanu - A Century of Loneliness.” Another "Valentina Rusu Ciobanu - one hundred years since birth." Can both translations be simultaneously correct? I feel the tense dance in her work between conformity to the arbitrary system that surrounded her, and her internal flight above those earthly cares. For Rusu Ciobanu, that dance was, is, a highly defined series of needles to be swiftly threaded, imposed by an authoritarian and threatening government. A folklore maiden facing the impossible tasks imposed by an wicked sorcerer could hardly have managed the task more deftly.

Rusu Coibana painted many, many interesting surrealist images, which I highly recommend taking some time looking over, if that is the work that speaks to you (I think valentinarusuciobanu.com, is the official site). For myself, at this day and time, I like, best the portrait of Dumitru Fusu.

I wonder what styles and forms will speak to me a decade from now, if I'm still here and moving forward in time on this journey of my own.

I started this project two years or so before my mother passed away. It's a quixotic enterprise for sure; all the important people I could share this language with in the way I am hearing it in my mind have passed away. Some friends have commented that it was an excellent undertaking for Covid-19 days. It was. With all the disruptions of the past two years, it's been a good project because it can be picked at with something that resembles diligence and consistency.

Ukrainian is a tough language, not least because of the past two centuries of the land's history, torn between Austro-Hungarians and Poles and Russians and Soviets, mean that its current form (and how best to teach it!) is still a matter of some debate. Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), whose literary heritage is regarded as the foundation of Ukrainian literature--and, to a large extent, the legitimization of Ukrainian as an independent language--was jailed and exiled as a revolutionary for daring to honor his own language as a worthy medium of expression. Most late-life learners of Ukrainian quickly become aware of this political resonance in their learning choice.

All that said, it's a beautiful language, Slavic but sometimes described as "the sixth Romance language," with beautiful rolled Rs and many, many vowel sounds. The nightingale is a prized national symbol. What kind of a lunatic nation takes a tiny brown-feathered songbird as their national emblem?

In today's world, there are multiple resources online for learning Ukrainian. These are ones I've personally found useful:

--Duolingo has a short learning tree (which includes ~⅓ the number of lessons as its French or Spanish counterpart). A fine place to get started.
--Glossika has a full 5,000 spoken Ukrainian sentences--voiced by one of the harshest speakers of Ukrainian I have ever heard. It's only free for 7 days, but is a great resource for improving one's ear. Caveat: it does not exactly further one's sense of the famously poetic character of the language.
--The UK Ukrainian Language organization is an excellent source for beginning pronunciation and for reading. The first three lessons are particularly helpful--before it launches into daunting immersive mode!
--Anna Ohoiko has a beautifully put together collection of language lessons and podcasts at Ukrainian Lessons. This is a free resource, with extras that can be added for a charge. This site has been active for a few years now, so there it a lot of content.
--for flashcards, Anki has some useful language decks (though Ukrainian does not rate as one of their top languages). Access to content requires a log-in. I find the ☀️Ukrainian Language Vocabulary: Illustrated deck particularly good--because it is my own creation and reflects my personal idiosyncrasies.

These sources—they subtly contradict each other, and it is, I find, that peculiar disorderly subtlety that offers my biggest challenge to learning Ukrainian. What is this language I am learning? A Russian influenced variant? A modern artificially nationalist one? Certainly it's not the "pure" ancient tongue of my forebears.

And yet, I find myself enraptured.  Between the 20th century diaspora and the last 30 years of Ukrainian independence--the culture and language are unsettled and in transition. It is a fascinating moment to participate in Ukrainian study.

It's been months since I drew trees and goats in Florida.  Now warm enough outside that it's time to get out and do the same thing here.

Happy first day of Summer!

I've spent the past week working on the Henry L. Zietlow Memorial Trophy project.  My father and I began work on this project almost exactly two years ago, and, finally, it's reached its end stages. In memory, I sense that this work will merge into the unmoored passage of the months through the Covid-19 pandemic; I'll look back on these two years in a very particular time and way that will be marked by a heightened sensation of death and mortality and our places in that arc.

As I write this the pandemic is not over, but its character, post the release of four effective vaccinations this past spring, has very clearly changed. We have a means of protecting ourselves, whether or not we are able, as human beings, to deploy it effectively or humanely. So--the virus has evolved, but so has our capacity to evolve with it.

I read the Nicholas Carey article this morning and found it fascinating. Largely, it's about identity, and questions of self that address the ancient nurture/nature conundrum.

These thoughts are colliding in my head, and then, one of the commentators in Carey's piece chipped in with the quotation that closes this entry.

It pulled some ideas together in my mind about all the things I've written above. Not in a way I could express here--that would take hours of writing and revision for a piece that is meant to be short.

But also it made me want to read Of Human Bondage, to find the context for these words.

Ivana Kupala Day is celebrated in Ukraine July 6-7. It's more a festival than a holiday: the celebrations roots are ancient, as a celebration of the summer solstice, but it ... had a hard time making it intact through the 20th century, under the Soviet Regime.

"Reverence," "Indulgence," "Sumptuous," "Entitlement"--this is the vocabulary that comes to mind when I think "John Singer Sargent."  But then there is Sargent's friend, Henry Tonks. With whom none of these words can be associated.

Tonks was not an easy man to know. A physician before he became a painter--and during World War I, he became, for a time, physician again. Appointed an official war artist in 1918, he painted a series of uncompromising portraits of wounded soldiers which I do not recommend looking up on the internet unless you want to be upset. One of Tonks's early students, from the time Tonks was teaching in London, wrote:

We live in an amazing age when it comes to family documentation.  Philip Sampson was my grandmother's older brother.  He was one of the soldiers who participated in that famous "Christmas in the trenches."

Thanks go to my cousin Julie, for finding, and sharing, this article with me.