Last year I was in Paris. You can say it was a kind of cold winter and I remember that day of the week being Thursday because on Thursdays the Louvre is open till ten at night. And there I was at four pm standing on its doorsteps. Chop and change: coldness of Parisian streets was defused by the museum’s warmth, plus presence and smell of old masters; I felt drugged. Puddling in euphoria, I felt as if I was a chosen visitor, that in the whole of this building of the Louvre, there wouldn’t be a single human specimen who would have been able to connect to the works of art the way I could.
Somewhere in my blind spot, the flare-faced art guides rushed along the Louvre’s passageways. Surrounded by believe-what-I-hear listeners, those guides, in variety of languages, were shouting out the names of paintings and painters, patrons and royals, were reciting passages tediously describing the historical events and peculiar circumstances of how and when some of those commissions were conceived and accomplished. The name of Medici family ping-ponged in the halls, sounding exactly the same in all languages and having the same value in euros and dollars. So, no surprise, that almost every ordinary visitor of the Louvre, on that Thursday, wanted to take a selfie with a background of Mona Lisa. While the parquetry floor in front of Mona Lisa was hosting a Chinese dragon in red striped track pants that was stabbing the museum air with dozens of selfie- sticks, the space in front of the Leonardo’s ”Lady with ermine” was completely er-er-mine.
In solitude, from the very close distance I stood and stared at the lady controlling her beast, and, honestly, I didn’t want to know if she also was commissioned. Despite being fully involved with the Lady and her pet, some parts of me were escaping from the Louvre and running back into the past, to that very moment when some children’s drawings had crossed my path. How was it possible that while in front of me on the walls there were the most incredible pieces of art, silly me was tempted by some memory flashbacks? Those seemingly irrelevant children’s drawings… at that moment, they were even more significant than Renaissance.
Year and a half later, during my recent trip to Ukraine I met up with my friend, the greatest artist who once had showed me those children’s works His name is Sergei Hangaldian, he modestly lives and paints in the city of Kharkiv. Due to his amazing generosity those large gouaches now have become a part of my collection.
When children paint or draw, they are never commissioned. They are driven only by their own need to put their observations about the beauty of their world on paper, motivated by only one kind of reward- the abundance of joy of making a mark. The mockery is that its always the parents who demand from their children to be telling the truth, while it’s also the adults who are so good at distorting it. But when you observe how children deal with their characterisations, no matter how far their depictions may seem to be removed from reality, at the bottom of children’s creations always lies the naked body of truth.