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She’ll admit her conversational English isn’t very good. But at her fingertips, Marina Konovalova-Bare, 26, has a talent that allows her to translate the ordinary into the universal language of beauty.
It was the language she knew — second only to her native tongue — growing up in St. Petersburg, Russia, a place she calls “an artists’ city.”
The influences of what’s been described as “a kaleidoscopic variety of styles and movements,” from the social criticism, salon painting and impressionist art of the pre-revolutionary years, through avant-gardism, socialist realism and nonconformist art, to the “permitted” figuration, hyperrealism and post-modern painting of more recent times, spoke to the former Marina Konovalova since the moment she walked into the Children’s Art School at age 11. There, she studied oil painting, still life, drawing and composition.
She spoke that language of artistic beauty so proficiently that, in 1989, she was nominated to study at the former Imperial Academy of Painting and Drawing, where such artists as Rerih, Malevich and Serov had studied. She was admitted to the Seminary of Christian Religion, where she learned the art of painting Russian icons, and also attended the Academy Theater Arts, where she studied until she met Salisbury building contractor John Bare.
Bare was fascinated with Russian culture and wanted to visit the city’s State Hermitage Museum, which boasts 3 million art items from the Stone Age to the 20th century.
“I’d called local travel agencies and they basically told me they couldn’t get me there,” Bare says. So he searched the Internet for international transportation. That, he says, is how he met Marina.
“We just talked,”Bare remembers, adding that Marina’s computer program helped translate his English words to Russian and vice versa.
He was overwhelmed by her art history knowledge. “She has extensive background, she knows all the artists. If you go to the Hermitage, it’s like having your own private tour,” he says.
And, apparently, he wasn’t too disappointed with her charm, fire-red hair and dancer’s physique, either for, confidently, he asked if she would speak her language of love and art to him forever. On July 2, they were married and they soon introduced her work to Bruce Wilson at The Fine Frame Gallery.
“I’m impressed with her ability at a young age to capture (scenes) as well as she can,”Wilson says. “I think of it almost as an expressionistic style with a little bit of impressionism … I was immediately taken by that.”
Konovalova-Bare’s oil work is playful, with color, dimension, light and shadow. Much of it reflects images in St. Petersburg — scientist Ivan Pavlov’s home, the gardens around the palace of Catherine II, the Moika River, the Church of the Blood where Alexander IIwas assassinated. More recently, she’s recreated scenes that are popular to Salisburians, such as the fountain behind First Presbyterian Church.
The artist admits she has no definitive style, that she “likes to paint different things.”
“She paints whatever grabs her,”Bare explains. “But she doesn’t care for Picasso or abstract style … She doesn’t think too much of the skill involved, making up an image that doesn’t have some basis in reality.”
“I’m not being critical,”she notes. “(Salvador) Dali made a very special, personal style of painting. And Picasso may have this, too. Yes, this can lead in the world, this special style, but my personal opinion, I … don’t like that.”
“Yet there’s an edge there where it crosses over,” Bare interjects, explaining that, though she has her own opinion about surreal art, his wife also indulges in ink-and-brush drawings that depict fantastic Turnip Kings and other vegetable creations.
“Painting is my life,” Konavalova-Bare says.
“She was telling me about working through school,” her husband says. “She would leave from school and go to art school and get home and have to, very sleepily, either do homework before or on the way home or whenever she could stick it in there. And that was her day for years.”
Even the size of her canvases proves she would let nothing stop her from speaking to the world through her painting. Some of her work is done on canvases that look no wider in length than an average telephone book.
That, her husband explains, is because “she couldn’t paint during winter because the house was closed in and the fumes from the paint would (disturb) her family. So he painted in the summertime” when she could take a canvas onto her balcony. But it was only 35-cm. wide.
“So that limited the size of her paintings.”
But it did not limit her talent.
“I’m just bowled over about how good she is,” Wilson says. “(She’s) really modest about (her ability). With (her) education, she’s ahead of so many artists her age in any of our Western (culture), though we do have some students who get into the arts early if they are lucky enough.”
Konovalova-Bare says she finds American art and artists “interesting” but does not plan to study art, American or otherwise, anymore.
“I’m tired of studying!” she quips.
If she never studies the history of another artist or learns another brush stroke, Wilson believes Konovalova-Bare has a good career ahead of her.
“But I think, now, she just wants to paint,”Bare says. “She doesn’t really think about what it’s gonna turn into … she wants to have it as a career but Idon’t think she’s thinking too much about fame or fortune.”
Like a parent who wants to share words of affection and knowledge to a child, Konovalova-Bare gazes at her paintings.
“This is my baby,”she says. “I love it.”
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