OOF

so nice you see them , twice

plus a bonus progress shot for you since i find it quite funny:

hi i'm gonna talk about this for a minute.

so immediately, i loved this fucking sculpture, and i wanted to know who it was by and where it is. the notes largely pointed to a Russian sculptor named Dmitry Tugarinov, and that this sculpture is a 2005 piece titled "Birch". cool! but then i kept googling, and i realized i could not find a source for this photo that wasn't from pinterest. uncool! however, on my search, i somehow found two more pictures of nearly identical sculptures, all credited to Dmitry Tugarinov, but from different years and made of different materials!

according to the Association of Moscow Sculptors, Tugarinov created this wood sculpture in 1994:

equally gorgeous in form, with a few small differences (the hair is in a bun, she seems to be wearing shoes, etc) so i worried that someone saw the stone sculpture and automatically assumed that it was also by Tugarinov.

then i found THIS picture (also from pinterest, unfortunately) of a porcelain version of the sculpture, credited to Tugarinov but from 1997:

again, slightly different in the details but obviously another version of the same piece. now i'm fascinated. what is Tugarinov's interest in this motif? and are all of these pieces truly by him, or by other artists reinterpreting his work??

but finally, FINALLY, the real answer came from this interview from 2023 from a russian magazine called Motherland (and shoutout to @corvidad for linking to this in the notes!!)

in the interview, Tugarinov does confirm his longterm fascination with depicting large, healthy women in this shoulderstand, or "Birch", pose. recalling an incident after he let the military:

I wandered around the street and accidentally found a physical therapy room. The door was open, looked inside. On the floor lay a yellow parquet, instead of one of the walls - solid glass, and behind the window - a birch grove. And all this was located exactly at the level of the eyes. In the hall in the posture "Birch" froze aunts in the coaching - cooks, maids, cleaners ... Normal healthy women [...] I both saw it and opened my mouth. Of course, I was immediately pushed out of the hall: some stranger is harboring in the doorway. But the spectacle was broken into memory, immediately tried to depict it. An image was born: here it is, the Russian birch, only as if upside down, the opposite is the opposite.

(translation came from firefox's built in russion to english translator, so apologies for the poor translation or grammar).

he goes on to discuss the fascination with replicating this pose, the struggles of finding model who could hold the position for long enough, the multiple attempts at both sketches and sculptures of that pose, until finally he appears to confirm the location of the original stone (granite!) sculpture:

And seventeen years ago, I was ordered a big, big birch. It stands in a private village on the shore of the Klyazma reservoir. Cushed from a single piece of granite, height - four meters, weighs from eighteen to twenty tons. God bless the customer, who suggested: let's do it.

(to be fair, based on the article it's also possible this photo is actually of a "similar sculpture for a symposium in Solnechnogorsk" that was stolen two months after he made it, but because there are multiple images of this one I'm assuming it's the one near the Klyazma river).

so there you have it!

tl;dr the sculptor is Dmitry Tugarinov, a Russian artist who sculpted many variations of his "Birch" sculptures from at least 1994-2005. The one originally pictured is a 4 meter tall, 18-20 ton granite sculpture, probably sculpted in 2005 for a village near the Klyazma river, but he's done many variations in different sizes and materials.

thank you for following me through this journey. now i leave you with one last photo from the Motherland article: Birchception

Long time no farcille! I just finished my zine in preparation for Lightbox, so I'm conducting a little interest check to see how many copies I should print.

It's going to be a 92 page compilation of 5 comics, illustrations, life drawings, and doodles, and it'll be going for $30 USD. Please only fill out the form if you're interested!

Thank you so much!