Eugenie Vronskaya: How to paint Scotland from London
Moving south from the Highlands spurred Eugenie Vronskaya into working on landscapes of her former home
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Your support makes all the difference.For 15 of the 16 years Eugenie Vronskaya lived in the Highlands, she barely painted a single landscape. Like her hero Giorgio Morandi, she was a specialist of the meditative still life, painting jars and children's toys while an operatic spectacle of mountains and sky unfolded outside the window. “I've always loved telling stories through the objects in my immediate surroundings,” she says.
It took a visit from the London gallerist John Martin to jolt her out of her comfort zone. Martin persuaded her to cast her attention beyond the confines of her studio and focus on the landscape she'd always enjoyed roaming but seldom painted. The result? The Night Walker, a new collection of shimmeringly beautiful paintings currently on display in Martin's Mayfair gallery in London.
Wandering the countryside at night, Vronskaya enjoys feeling out of sync with the world. “You're intruding on a place you're not supposed to be. You're in time and space which is your own, and it's like knowing something no one else knows. It's more wandering than walking, because it's not about the destination. It's just about being in the landscape.”
Vronskaya was born in Moscow in 1966. She trained in icon painting from the age of nine and was Moscow University of Fine Art's youngest ever student. Arriving in London in 1989 – aged 23 but with 14 years of classical training behind her – she eked out a living painting on the street. “I loved the narrow roads, the buildings crowded on top of each other, the double-decker buses and colourful crowds. It was heaven, and I painted with huge excitement.”
Within a year she had a solo show at Agi Katz's Boundary Gallery in St John's Wood. She also fatefully crossed paths with Sir Anthony Caro, who remained a grandfatherly figure until his death two years ago. “He always made sure I was OK, even when I lived miles away. He said lovely things about my work, but he was always honest and I am forever grateful to him.”
From 1991-92 she studied at the Royal College of Art – the college's first Russian student – and was on her way to becoming a fixture of London's vibrant Nineties painting scene when her husband, a Sufist, was commanded to move to Scotland to begin a religious colony.
The marriage didn't last, but she stayed in Scotland, supporting her two children through portraiture. In 2006 she painted portraits of 120 local Highlanders for a project she called Iconostas.
She came to love Scotland, but a couple of years ago began to find her work predictable for the first time. “I could do certain things very well, and when I picked up my brush I found that I knew how the painting would begin and end. I still loved it, and could easily do it for 16 to 18 hours a day, but you need that uncertainty.”
Then came the visit from Martin. “He saw a little thread and very patiently pulled it. His input was crucial in allowing me to develop in a more exciting direction. He's got an eye. I wanted to push myself, to do what I had perhaps always wanted but didn't dare.”
The Night Walker bears witness to Vronskaya's ambivalence about living such a cut-off existence. In many of the paintings (Horse in Red, Caithness Moon and Over the Hills) a solitary figure roams a seductively snow-streaked landscape. Shimmering between background and foreground, the figure struggles to register her existence. To live alone with nature, the paintings seem to warn, is to risk being engulfed by it. In the wilderness, without a culture to challenge and define us, we slip away and become nothing.
“I cannot live in a vacuum any more,” Vronskaya says. “I am attracted to the comfort, silence and stillness of Scotland, which for an artist is hugely important, but I have reached the point where I need to be around other artists, critics, that whole environment.”
So for the second time in her life, Vronskaya finds herself relocating to London, excited about what the move might mean for her career. Already it's having an effect. Her paintings were always studied, intimate and thoughtful. Now they're open-ended and free. “It is as much a surprise to me as it is for the people who have been following my work for many years, and that's wonderful. There's a lot of excitement. People write and ring, saying, 'I can't believe you could do this the whole time'.”
'Eugenie Vronskaya: The Night Walker', to 21 November, John Martin Gallery, London (www.jmlondon.com)
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