Ilya Yod

I went to the spa yesterday and lost three hours of work time. Determined to catch up, I tried to complete the two drawings I'd planned. However, despite hard work, I only managed to finish one and a quarter pieces.

As I suspected, the spa visit disrupted my work schedule, and I fell short of my goals.

The good news is that I finally made my first drawing of Estonia, and it turned out even better than I'd imagined. While I'm not entirely happy with some elements, like the trees (I'm still struggling with those!), I think the overall impression is quite good.

The drawing features a wooden house in the foreground surrounded by several pine trees. These are some of my favourite trees, but also the most difficult for me to draw. I'm still having trouble with their foliage and the colour of their trunks. I need to find a solution quickly if I want to progress with my watercolour sketch, which also features a pine tree that takes up a third of the composition.

I think I'll start by looking at how Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Chinese painters tackled pine trees. Then I'll do a few studies of my own pine tree using white pen on black paper (inversion aids shape comprehension.) Only then will I return to my watercolour sketch, which will advance my series of paintings with cubic figures and houses.

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Today's the rare day when I'm home alone for several hours. J. moved to Tallinn for three days, and the flat's become wonderfully silent. I love listening to this 'ringing silence' – I can't recall who coined the term, though. It was only disturbed for about an hour by a vacuum cleaner that goes about its business every day – a curious artist in its own right, wouldn't you say?

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I spent the whole day drawing a pine tree. Seven hours of work and two-thirds of a white gel pen later, the drawing is finished, but it still doesn't satisfy me. That's the reality of the artist's life: pouring hours, days, and years into something that's more likely to end up in the bin than on the wall.

Wednesday brings a full workday for me. I aim to create a watercolour to refine my digital sketches for a series of paintings I'm currently working on. Additionally, I plan to draw the landscape outside my window using white pen on black paper, as the frigid -10°C temperature makes outdoor sketching impossible.

Being in Estonia is a wonderful experience, and I would regret not capturing Estonia's beauty in my artwork. Over a year has passed, yet I haven't drawn a single thing, despite the stunning landscapes revealed during my daily walks.

An invitation has arrived for me to spend three hours at a spa – Estonia is renowned for its delightful Nordic spas. My month-long subscription is ending soon, and a spa visit might be a tempting option. However, it would likely encroach upon my full workday and disrupt my drawing plans. This has happened to me far too often.

I need to make progress on my paintings and adhere to my scheduled work time. Only by doing so do I have a chance to complete ten paintings in four months and also create a dozen drawings of Estonia.

But then, a question arises: can I truly call my artistic pursuits "work"? Here in Estonia, I have no exhibitions, no income from my artwork. This brings my activities back to the realm of a hobby.

The "hobby" label sticks in my head, eroding my motivation. "Spa, or anywhere really," I tell myself, "since I have no actual work, just a hobby."

Yet, I know I will regret not painting. Procrastination and an inability to say "no" to temptation will gnaw at me, diminishing my self-esteem and professional integrity as an artist. My drawing technique still requires refinement, and I'm not seizing this chance to be surrounded by nature, create multiple drawings, and progress in landscaping—crucial for my upcoming paintings.

I just found out that Ello, a social network for artists, shut down a few months ago. I wasn't using Ello a lot, but the news made me think about how things work in the world.

Ello was a well-made platform with a strong community of dedicated artists. It tried to run it without making a lot of money, unlike most popular social networks. Ello didn't have ads or promoted posts, which was great for artists but probably a financial problem for the owners. Maybe because of this, Ello stopped working one day, showing that you can't survive without making money.

Ello's story showed me that it's not enough to create great things if you want them to keep going. The economy is important. If you don't pay attention to the business side, you're going to fail! Just like many great artists throughout history have failed because they didn't know how to manage the business side of their art. It's crazy to think about how many great works of art we've never seen because of this.

On the other hand, there are a lot of artists who focus more on business than on their art. That's why there's so much mediocre art around today.

Focusing too much on business means you don't have enough time to develop your artistic skills. It also often leads to making the same kind of art over and over again, which gets boring quickly.

It's 10 o'clock. Time to get to work on my paintings. About a week ago, I decided to plan out my work schedule, hoping to boost my progress and improve my organization.

In a typical week, I have six working days. Saturday's my day off, the only one when the whole family's free, so we spend it together. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Sundays are my most productive days. I've calculated I have ten hours to work on those, so I call them "full-working days." Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are "half-working days" with only three or four hours available.

The plan's still rough around the edges, but it's already cleared my head about work organization. Even though the same question keeps turning in my brain, "What for?". I've been staying in Estonia for a bit more than a year now, a country I deeply appreciate, especially for its stunning Nordic nature. But Estonia's too small for a robust art community or market. Making art here feels like, as the French say, "pissing in a cello."

Art is a form of communication. If it's not shared, it becomes just a collection of molecules sharing space. Like anything in this world, it becomes nothing without a conscious mind to observe and give it meaning.

Creating art in a place where art barely exists is tough. But the possibility of moving to London next year fuels my painting, driving me to finish my series with cubic figures and houses. I don't want to arrive in London empty-handed, and finding a studio space there worries me—it's an overcrowded and expensive city.

It took me a few hours to find the perfect bush, an element crucial to the middle ground I sought for my painting series. The middle ground separates the white figure made of cubes in the foreground from the white houses in the background.

I'm talking to you about the series of paintings with cubic figures and their houses that I'm currently working on. Sometimes, the sheer length of artistic research like this surprises me, especially when I consider if viewers will even notice the bush!

So, I wanted a bush typical of French gardens, as I made sketches for this series in the French town of Niort. I envisioned it with cold green leaves and dense foliage to cast contrasting hard shadows, highlighting the white cubes of the figure through the stark contrast between light and dark.

I also desired a variable top contour for the bush, allowing me to adapt it to different backgrounds in future paintings. My requirements proved challenging to meet. Perhaps research would be easier if I were in France now, exploring directly instead of relying on the internet.

Regardless, I scoured online images. Google kept pushing Estonian websites, offering little information on French gardens. It's a curious thing—we often think of the internet as global, but research platforms and social media track our location, restricting us to content from our immediate area.

I employed various tricks to immerse myself in the French online space, like VPNs and fake locations, but they yielded little success in easing my research.

Finally, I turned to BARD, a Google AI language model I find helpful at times. BARD's solution worked magic today. I found my ideal bush: the Laurus Nobilis. It seems to tick all the boxes. A quick digital sketch suggests it's a perfect fit, but only transferring it to canvas will tell for sure.

I am having my first daily coffee. I love coffee. I have always loved coffee so much that it is probably my favorite drug. Coffee has something special. It is bitter and unpleasant, but every new sip gives me the desire to drink more. Life is like that. Every disappointment gives the desire to survive.

I am writing to you while I should be working. I had planned to start painting a new series of paintings in September 2023. Today is January 2024 and I still haven't started painting. It's true that I have been sketching all this time, but I think the real reason I haven't started painting is my fear of it. I find the task of painting landscapes with gardens too difficult. I'm still not very confident in my ability to paint nature.

I also have problems with the cubic figure I plan to bring to the foreground. I wanted it to be white, like the houses, to create a link between people and their homes. However, while I was making computer sketches, I realized that the white figure blends in with the white houses in the background. The composition also lost its focal point.

A few days ago, I came up with a solution of integrating a kind of green bush behind the cubic figure. However, I am still looking for the best type of bush to use.

Even though the feeling of fear to suppose is present, I am moving forward, even if it is much slower than I had originally imagined for the series.

I am 39 years old and feel like everything is too late for me. Writing is too late, my new artistic path in London is too late, developing my art technique is too late. And what for?

These days, artists become famous young because there are people who can make a lot of money from a young artist and half as much money from an artist of 39 years old.

We all love what is young and new. We love freshness and innocence, not old and sad. We are attracted by the energy of life, like by young trees, not by half-lifed trees.

Detail 003, 2022

paper, colored pencils

29,7X38,7CM

Studying sky color with acrylic on aquarelle paper A4. 2019

Medium: acrylic on paper

Figure 009, 2018

Having lived in Russia for more than 20 years, I continue to reflect about radical political practices such as communism. Visually, Soviet ideology used bright and positive images of joyful and self-confident people to promote itself. I explored this trend in the painting I called ‘Convinced’.

Medium: tempera and gouache on canvas. Size: 80 x 70 x 4 cm. N 043

Figure 004, 2018

Painting in progress.

Medium: tempera and gouache on canvas. Size: 60 x 60 x 2 cm. N 035

The “Walking man” illustrative poster, I made in 2016, was invited to participate in the MAZIPOS, an itinerant poster exhibition, an artist database, a global fanzine exhibition, in Romania. A lot of thanks for the invitation to Carlos Сarmonamedina.

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“MAZIPOS is a quarterly fanzine that works as an itinerant exhibition. Every edition we invite 25 artists to produce posters that can be mailed and displayed in different venues around the world. Anyone can curate their own exhibition by selecting works from our artists’ database! The project is sponsored by the Visual Kontakt gallery.”

MAZIPOS

Client — Personal Date — 2016 Art direction —