Alla Kechedzhan

Alla Kechedzhan | Where Is Our Mother

You are a writer, artist, and educator — how do these roles influence each other in your creative process?

Goethe and Schilling’s expression about architecture as frozen music is often quoted.

But few people remember that this is a paraphrase of the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos: “Painting is mute music, and poetry is speaking painting”.

In my case, painting is frozen or, on the contrary, revived literature.

For example, I write a prose poem about an alligator-like mountain and draw this mountain at the same time.  It’s hard to say for sure, but it seems that the words came first, or perhaps it was the oil painting of the sea that inspired the metaphor.

Most of the seascapes, whether I’m on the Mediterranean coast in Tel Aviv or on the Black Sea coast in Varna, are actually the Azov Sea of my childhood, described in the “City Island” novella series published in the literary and artistic journal “Neva” in October 2024.

In one of my stories, “The Dry Land,” I describe the state of nature in late August, when the cicadas have stopped singing, the trees are still lush green, and the dry grasses crackle beneath them, as if the earth and the sky had switched places. And then this ocher-golden color appears in every summer painting, in the same “House in Provence” (my free replica of Cézanne’s painting of the same name).

In 2024, in Varna, I wrote a thick book about the fates of modern women. In the summer  of 2025, I created collective portraits of these women on my canvases, inspired by Picasso, Modigliani, and Soutine. These are not imitations or even replicas, but rather hints.

As for my educational projects, for example, all the drawings for the book “Mathematics for Hopeless Humanists” were made with a glarus feather on the sand at the beach in Varna – a kind of cave painting. Shadows were used as diagonals and chords, and seaweed was used to explain multidimensional space.

In general, whatever I do, it’s just countless acts of creativity, or acts of creation.

I have just returned from Varna, where about 30 paintings were created in a month.

One of the last paintings was very difficult for me – it was a test of inner freedom.

I made a landscape on a 27×43 laminated board. I ran out of canvases, and I found a piece of wood from a kitchen countertop. I really wanted to depict alpine cedars with their spreading branches. The painting is called “Alpine Cedars at Dusk” (see below). I painted two cedars in the garden of my house.

Then I realized that I have to add two more cedars on top of the house in the foreground, which would divide the space and potentially damage what I had already painted.

I took a deep breath and quickly painted two cross-shaped cedars across the entire canvas.

My art teacher, Irina Dragunskaya, praised my work as a beautiful and delicate painting.

Freedom, including freedom of expression, is always a big risk.

Alla Kechedzhan | Alpine Cedars At Dusk

Many of your artworks are full of emotional and expressive energy. What usually inspires you to start a new painting?

Once I rewatched the film of the famous director Sergei Parajanov “The color of the pomegranate”. I was literally taken aback by the kaleidoscope of pictures that I wanted to stop.

I immediately grabbed a teaspoon instead of a master and from memory displayed a frame from the film – for about 40 minutes.

This canvas is like my eldest daughter Yulia, who graduated from Moscow State University, is well acquainted with the history of fine arts. They said that the picture looks like an icon and a tapestry at the same time.

It’s not about the event, the event is only a trigger for the sensations.

I write the sensations with color, which create the shapes themselves.

Or over there. From my window, I can see a house without a roof. In my painting, it has been restored. In my world, a house can be drawn and lived in. By the way, this is the basis for the current popular visualization technique.

The painting “House with a Roof” (Varna, August 2025) is an example of the fact that in one of the many realities that exist continuously, without time, like in Borges’ “Garden of Forking Paths,” there is a house with a roof. It is simply a frame from a movie that not everyone sees.

I am inspired by anything that captures my attention and gives it volume and depth.

This can be seen in the semantics of color.

For example, Homer’s sea is “wine-like,” and the bulls are the same color. Wine represents power, brilliance, and turbulence.

I’m currently working on a Dali-inspired painting titled “The Chase,” where the bulls are fleeing from a predatory beast that remains unseen.

In 2025 alone, you created around 200 works. What drives this incredible productivity?

I have already partially answered this question. If I were to put it succinctly, the answer would be a single phrase: The desire for creativity, because, as Boris Pasternak’s son once said, “What is written precedes life,” and Joseph Brodsky believed that poetry, in its broadest sense, is the essence of human existence. I always strive to glimpse the invisible, pushing aside the obvious as a mere veil, and this can only be achieved through the subtlest of nuances, hints, and insights. This is how I perceive life.

Alla Kechedzhan | Portrait Of Van Gogh

You have studied various techniques — from Arte Povera to Picasso-like styles. Which technique feels closest to your personal voice?

The technique depends on the mood first of all, and then on the materials.

For example, if I want to make a sketch while visiting someone, I always have charcoal, a pencil, a few pastels, and sometimes watercolors in my purse.

This is how I created the house of the famous poet and writer Mikushevich while waiting for my wife at a dacha in a picturesque area. The house is surrounded by centuries-old linden trees, and it has been standing for several centuries. I filled a cap with water and created a watercolor painting. It was like sending a message to my teacher, who is now in a better world.

I’m close to spontaneity, and I think impressionism and post-impressionism are the closest to me.

My teachers taught me “not to look at the great ones from the habit of looking up, but to enter into a dialogue with them.”

For example, one of my projects in mathematics is called “My friend, Pythagoras.”

So, in painting – there were free interpretations of the Red Room of Matisse, the Portrait of Van Gogh, the cubism of Picasso in several paintings or the Woman of Munch.

In May 2025, I sent three of my works to the “Dreams and Nightmares” exhibition at the Boomer Gallery in London. I must say that I have a mystical fear of some of my works (a joke).

The organizers of the exhibition asked me to evaluate the paintings, as galleries naturally seek to make money from the artists they exhibit.

I called an artist I know who is a regular participant in international exhibitions and asked him what price would be appropriate for the paintings. He replied that each painting was worth at least 100,000 to 150,000 pounds. I thought it was a joke, but he seemed serious.

I signed the paintings and sent a letter with my short biography to Konstantin Kosmin, a London-based artist and art critic. To my surprise, two of the paintings were accepted for the exhibition at a price of 120,000 pounds each.

It’s a pity that I didn’t have a visa to visit Britain, and I had to obtain permission from the Ministry of Culture to export my work, which was a lengthy process. However, this experience convinced me that I needed to exhibit my work. By the way, one of the experts at the Boomer Gallery is the renowned art critic Tabish Khan. He is the editor of the visual arts section for Londonist magazine and a regular contributor to Culture Whisper.The opinions of art critics and artists with prestigious names are truly inspiring.

I am currently preparing a solo exhibition.

Alla Kechedzhan | Between Kandinsky and Van Gogh

In your view, what is the role of paradox in both your writing and visual art?

The famous essayist and literary critic Sergey Prasolov said that in my novel “The Love Agent Against the Reptiloids,” I combined reality and unreality in such a way that when you look at the surreal world in my characters’ minds, you better understand reality.

By the way, Vladimir Mikushevich studied the nature of creativity and created the field of “creatiology.” What comes to my mind is better than what comes out of my head.

My first paradoxes were co-authored with him.

I wrote my flashes and insights based on his flashes. Currently, there are two volumes of “The Book of Paradoxes,” each containing 500 insights.

In my opinion, the combination of the incomprehensible, whether it is verbal or non-verbal art, creates other worlds that are not fully understood, and the very process of encountering them makes the reader and viewer a co-creator of any work of art.

Alla Kechedzhan | Munch’S Woman

How do you see the relationship between intuition and structure in painting?

Once, the professor of the Moscow School of Painting, Sorokin, invited the student future famous Russian impressiont Konstantin Korovin to his dacha.

He could not manage to paint his dacha.

Sorokin argued that first you have to make a drawing, the same logs, and then paint. Korovin said: it won’t work out. There is no drawing!

There is only color in the form.

Korovin’s “Contrasts and Spots” brought the landscape of his dacha to life, although it wasn’t done the way he was taught.

Alla Kechedzhan | A House In Provence

What place do symbols and metaphors hold in your work — do they emerge spontaneously or are they deliberate?

I will answer this question with my diary entry, and it is better to call the answer “Overcoming metaphors”.

From the diary of Alla Kechejan

May 9, 2025

It’s a good thing that few people are interested in the history of paintings. Even the famous ones.

Here is a T-shirt with an AR print – augmented reality, that is. The print features a painting by Vincent van Gogh called “The White House”.

The symbolism of this painting is not obvious to the layman, even if he knows from Wikipedia that the painting was painted 6 weeks before the artist’s death, and it is not difficult to guess that his mental illness has progressed. Or, on the contrary, van Gogh’s condition could be counterintuitively clear, like a day before a southern sunset.

The other day I made a replica of Van Gogh’s White House, which only vaguely resembles the great artist, but the composition and colors are partially recognizable. I made this picture during the exacerbation of a serious illness.

The atmosphere in my painting is gloomy – the sky, the tiled roof and the fence are dirty, the cypresses, as a symbol of death, are in place, the gloomy passerby stands and does not look alive at all.

I think I’m going to the wrong place.

The painting was made with oil crayons on cardboard.

I don’t have a single canvas at home.

The paints are closed, the brushes are dried.

Drawing with gouache on children’s cardboard is the same as drying a herbarium on a clothesline – you’ll end up with a crumpled sheet.

But I take the paints and draw what seems to be the same “White House,” albeit in a childishly optimistic way, with light in every window, and the house takes off like Ellie’s house from Kansas City.

I understand that I’m destined to recover, even if it’s only six weeks away».

However, as you know, beauty and understanding are in the eye of the beholder.

For example, I have a painting called “Where’s Mom?”

It depicts two lost chicks searching for their mother. However, one of my social media followers said,

These are people, not chicks.

This is the state of a modern person who is lost, terrified of uncertainty and the absence of a loved one, lacking support.

Like a chicken that doesn’t know what to do: whether to hide in the grass, flee, or wait for trouble from the sky.”

So, to answer your question, I would say that my metaphors are often intuitive. However, as mathematicians say, intuition is a calculation that we don’t have time to fully comprehend.