luxury home (interview)
A brutal form with a delicate filling.
Today we talked about creativity with sculptor Olga Muravina, a member of the Moscow Union of Artists and the Association of Moscow Sculptors, the Moscow Union of Designers and the International Art Fund.
Olga Muravina’s sculpture gives joy in everyday life and not just in the gallery or museum. Her works are live and emotional art. Olga Muravina creates form from deep emotions, absorbing and letting the world around her through. Stone and bronze in her hands become the most delicate brutality.
Tell us a little about yourself, please. How did you first encounter art?
I think I’ve always been familiar with him. There were no artists in my family, but I started sculpting and drawing at the age of 2.5, at 5 I already knew I was going to be a sculptor, at 6 I went to the sculpture studio, at 12 I entered the Moscow Art School (it’s a lyceum under the Surikov Institute) and then the Surikov Institute. Studying at such an institute means a lot of hours of work with nature, studying composition, art history, anatomy and so on. In parallel, I was engaged in my own creative plastic experiments. All these 19 years of study in drawing and sculpture gave me a certain degree of freedom in the way I could express what I wanted to do. It was already possible to relax and think only about the emotional charge, the feeling that the work carried, as well as the concise plastic methods in conveying that charge. Art and independent creative work is always with me. My beloved husband and a great sculptor and partner in all projects (including children), Sergei Sobolev and I have worked all our lives for ourselves, all the time inventing projects, opening and closing commercial and non-commercial organizations, design offices and productions, making orders… After the circle we have passed, we both returned to our own creative work. For us there is only real joy and meaning in it. I have had over 50 exhibitions: in Russia, Holland, Spain, the United States, Singapore and Monaco. Each exhibition is an interesting experience. And that amazing feeling of wholeness, the feeling of the flowing state that you get in the process of creating a work, you can’t confuse afterwards with anything else.
Does the creative process begin with a certain image in your head or do you look for inspiration while creating a sculpture?
We all interact with the world around us, and life itself is a source of inspiration: it energizes and gives birth to images that begin to form, mature, and after a while want to be born. It’s a process which is very difficult
to prevent it. I need the creative process, it’s my nature.
A lot of your work is animalistic. Why this one?
You can’t call what I do animalism, because naturalism is inherent in this genre: a detailed study of animal species, habits, characteristics and their true-to-life depiction, and that’s not at all what I do. By portraying animals I try to convey rather an image, to humanize them. Through them, through their eyes, a certain light essence looks at me, we can say – the Absolute. All of them turn into some kind of fantasy cartoon characters. My animals are more like animals through the eyes of children, which is closer, perhaps, even to naive art. Although they all come to me from the outside, they are transformed and endowed with some kind of fairy-tale qualities along the way. In addition, I sculpt not only animals, but also my husband, children. Also, I made a toy project and many other things.
Your works are connected with a certain mood. What do they express?
A brutal form with a delicate filling. Love and inner purity, trust, childlike and maternal warmth, a combination of the funny and the thoughtful and melancholic. My work combines monumental stability with defenselessness, but in my world there are no predators, like in heaven, so they are happy there.
You are a well-known sculptor whose work is interesting to watch. And which contemporary sculptors have been a source of inspiration to you?
Thank you very much. I don’t think other sculptors can be a source of inspiration, they can be teachers. There are too many of them and teachers change in the course of life. My only permanent teacher is Sergei. If he doesn’t like the work, I never take the mold off of it and send it back to the clay tank. My first favorite teachers were Galina Danilovna Ivanovskaya and Alexei Ivanovich Blagovestnov.
In general, from art history, I was influenced not so much by contemporaries as by sculpture from antiquity: Paleolithic, Prikamye, Scythian, Incan, Egyptian, Etruscan, as well as Romanesque art, the Early Renaissance (mostly Donatello). If we consider the twentieth century, these are: Giacomo Manzu, Botero, Marino Marini, influenced paintings of the Northern and Italian Renaissance, Marc Chagall and Rousseau, Norstein cartoons with drawings by his wife Francesca Yarbusova, our Soviet Vinnie the Pooh, Miyazaki and Soviet toys and many more.
I see and know many wonderful artists, but still I have my own process, my own life, my own well. I have my own images that are born and beg to come out when they have formed and matured. When I release them, it’s a great pleasure, it’s as if I recognize them, I realize that the work is done and the theme lets go. It’s a very joyful process, from the conception of an idea to its realization in the material. Since other people’s keys will never fit at our doors, I form my own unique plastic language. I am always in search of the easiest and most expressive methods to convey my feeling, and it is very interesting.
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