vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #165 / Arts and Ideas / Reading article...

I have always gotten a creative charge from an art classroom or studio, something like the sensation a news junkie gets in a newsroom, whether it’s the New York Times or Vladivostok’s First English-Language Newspaper.

The studio is rich with the smell of turpentine and gouache. There are paint-blackened palates, jars bristling with brushes, and clutter intended to inspire the artist: mannequins, teapots, pseudo-classical plaster busts.

So I was pleased, mostly, when I dropped in for a drawing session at a Sanatornaya cultural foundation called Talent. Talent offers studio space and instruction from Fyodor Morozov, an artist whose face is ringed in shaggy hair and an Amish farmer’s beard. I joined a group of students working at easels around a still life that included a grimacing tribal figurine and a piece of paper folded like an accordion.

They all focused on interpreting the tableau set up for them. I sketched the Lenin bust sitting on top of the shelves. When I couldn’t make it understood that I liked to work with graphite and turpentine, I tried linseed oil, and created a smeary picture that looked like someone had been draining fried tortillas on it. Nevertheless it was fun. Who cared what it looked like?

So why didn’t I leave feeling more inspired? The problem was that something was missing: naked bodies.

People, people: quiet please. What I mean is, the sessions cost 50 rubles apiece ($8), and for the same rate, I used to attend drawing sessions in Seattle that included live models. Several nights a week, an art supply store opened its doors to artists, professors, students, Sunday painters, and the occasional riffraff, such as reporters. When my Philistine colleagues raised their eyebrows, I told them that half the models were male, including a bearded man who looked alarmingly like Rasputin stripped of his cassock. (Somehow this didn’t reassure them.)

True, there are other perks at Talent. Art supplies are included in the cost. Morozov is the sort of take-charge instructor who snatches your pencil and scribbles on your drawing. Talent even has a ceramics studio and two pottery wheels, where both kids and adults were busy the other day squishing clay into wobbly urns.

Still, 50 rubles seems pricey for those whose employers are, say, Russian publishing firms which sometimes forget to pay salaries for a month or two. Despite the easels and watercolors, Talent feels less like a cooperative of artists, and more like an art business. And while there’s nothing wrong charging what the market will bear – it’s commendable, in fact, to find art-lovers who can swing that – it might be nice to have something a little less dead than Lenin to focus your artistic energies on.