49. Pluses and Minuses of Living Alone.

The size of my household has been changing constantly in the last several years: 4-3-4-3-2-1-2, as my children and step-children were moving in and out. The size of my apartment has been trying to catch up. After my son moved to live in Idaho, I rented out one room for half a year, but a month ago I made another move, and now, for the first time in my life (really!), I live by myself.

It was, and still is, very strange. I am excited that  I don't need to close any doors, that I can wear whatever I want (or nothing at all), that I can eat sour cream or jam from a jar, and so on. Of course, I discussed it with Victor. Actually, as continuation of our "game," I offered him the next theme: "Living single." Well, I have to play with words again. The Russian word  "oдиночество"  ("odinochestvo") can have different connotations, which in English correspond to various words: from simply "being single," to more melancholic "solitude," to more dramatic "loneliness,"and more. Since I don't mean anything sad or dramatic, I'll just use plain "Living alone."

First, of course, we talked about  advantages of living alone. One of them was extra time that you may spend any way you like. For example, doing ceramics. So this was Victor's immediate response (I also used this drawing in the previous post about Women and Vases. It happened to be an intersection of totally different themes!)

 

 

But then, inspired by the richness of the topic, I recalled some of Victor's other works. They kind of continue the investigation of all the shades of "being alone" that I mentioned above. Although the following drawings were made awhile ago and were not meant to illustrate any of these synonyms, but that is how I see them.

 

 

"Solitude."

 

 

 

 

"Loneliness"

 

 

Well, actually the last drawing can hardly be seen as an advantage... Which brings us to the next portion of this post: Disadvantages of living alone. This was the next theme I offered to Victor, and first he e-mailed me that he couldn't see any. But still drew this one on the same day:

 

 

 

 

 

48. Women and Vases

For the title of this post, I've had difficult time translating a very simple word from Russian: "кувшин" ("koovshin"). The closest translations are a  "pitcher" and a "jar," but when I wanted to choose the one that is more appropriate for this post and googled "images" for each, for the most part I saw baseball pitchers and those standard containers used to preserve food. What I was looking for is beauty and elegance, because that's what the post is about. So I chose "vases", although it is definitely not what Victor meant when he named his drawings  "A woman and  a ... (jar???)."

Just this week Victor drew two of them with the same title. Why? We talked about ceramics again, how I wish I would continue doing it. Clearly, even though it has been awhile since I took my ceramics course, the topic is not exhausted. So these are the two new drawings:

 

 

After receiving the two of them, I remembered I'd seen similar ones before. For example, when I just started taking ceramics, Victor sent me this one. I've already published it in one of my ceramics-related posts, and even explained its title (see post 23).

"A Goddess Firing Pots"

"Богиня Обжигающая Горшки"

After seeing all these women with all these jars/pitchers/vases, I asked: Why so many? Victor responded that he loves to draw women with vases, because, number one, their shapes  are very similar, and number two, both are sexy. And then I remembered one more that he drew about a year ago, this one was actually called "A Vase." I guess, he is right in his comparison.