NATALIA VETROVA

By Rod Drown

For me, the most engaging works in painter Natalia Vetrova’s oeuvre are those possessing a near-photographic realism for subjects and situations arcane, exotic and sensual. Such pieces as September, Nostalgia, Tiger and White on Blue are marked by a very high standard of technical skill that gives these works, which at their furthest evoke mythological connotations, an extra level of articulation. This artist not only paints faces and forms with camera-like precision but also suggests to us their thoughts and actions, and reminds the sensual among us of how such thoughts and actions, expressed in touch, would feel.

September – The Trickster, The Muse and, in the background, Lovers in Marble:
three eternal situations

A Vancouver resident and seven years a Canadian citizen, Natalia Vetrova was born in Moscow and was a student in the last years of the Soviet Union’s communist system. She began her formal arts training at the Technical College of Industrial & Applied Arts in Moscow, specializing in sculpture between 1981 and 1985. Her love of sculpture then got her a position as an interior designer at a stained glass workshop in Moscow. Following her years at the technical college, she entered an even more rigorous institution, the Stroganov Academy of Art, from which she graduated with a Master’s Degree in Art Criticism and Design. Thus, during the last years of the USSR, Vetrova had over a ten-year period a sustained and disciplined classical education at two quite exclusive Moscow art schools.

Vetrova’s entrance to these prestigious institutions required her to write very difficult entrance exams. She knew, writing those exams, that of every seven applicants doing the same, only one would be successful. Her art education at both institutions was completely paid for by the Soviet state. It was here, she told me, that she had to learn how to recapitulate the various "schools" that art has gone through over the last 500 years. She and her fellow students had to recreate the old masters -- first the Italian Renaissance ones, then all those coming since.

Nostalgia – Vetrova’s three ladies sewing, a prime example of her beautifully detailed work. This won her Fourth Prize at an international competition held in Florence in 2007

She began exhibiting professionally after her graduation in 1995. At about the same time, her longing for inspiration and fresh ideas took her through the central Asian Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as a member of a geological expedition. After that she went to Europe. For a time she lived in Paris, where she survived by doing portraiture in front of that city’s most famous cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris. In 1997, her travels led her to Vancouver where she opened her Studio of Art and Design at which she now teaches and works. Over the last decade or so, her paintings have become much sought after by private collectors from all over the world.

White on Blue – An exquisite rendering of the age-old attraction of young women for fine horses.

Natalia Vetrova feels that the way she paints also reflects an inner journey. She told me that she feels her more recent paintings have more energy – maybe even more aggressiveness. I wanted to know what events brought had brought her to Vancouver and how hard had been to leave Mother Russia. She responded by saying, "I liked to travel. Traveling is a school for life. [At the time] not too many countries were open for immigration and I had the opportunity to come to Canada. Even so, I remember that Russia was a country from which it was not simple to leave. Even now I have problems with my documents when I visit Russia."

She emphasizes that it was with few regrets that she left her country of birth. "It was my choice [to leave Russia]. I did not cry as did the first wave of emigrants (from the 1917 Revolution). But it took me a lot of time to integrate into the new system."

At the same time she believes that her outer journey is not necessarily reflected in her paintings. "If my style (and my energy) has changed, it is a result of my age and my maturity as an artist. I don’t think the subjects of my paintings reflect my domestic situation or my various travels."

Tiger – Vetrova shows her artistic lineage

When I left her studio in Yaletown, she gave me postcard-size reproductions of four of her latest works. In these works, the paintings are both subtly erotic and poetically lovely. They are erotica without lewdness. They are nuanced with hints of the arcane, such as almost-hidden astrological symbols in the background and along the perimeters, which exist along side female images of sensuality and tenderness. In these very personal (as opposed to commissioned) works, she has begun experimenting with combinations of Japanese Haiku, numerology and painting. The poets are Sosekii, Sogetsu-Ni and Basho. In these works, she combines three elements – image, poetry and the arcane.

The haiku form emerged during the 16th century and was developed by the poet Basho (1644-1694) into a refined medium of Buddhist and Taoist symbolism. "Haiku," many modern Japanese poets are fond of saying, "began and ended with Basho." Natsume Soseki was the pen name of Natsume Kinnosuke, a Japanese novelist, scholar of British Literature, and composer of Chinese poetry. Sogetsu-Ni lived is a third well know haiku writer.

The front of each postcard contains the painting, which includes the numerological aspects. The back has the haiku, with a title chosen by Vetrova. In each of these works, lovely and sensual female torsos predominate in a "fade-in-fade-out" fashion within backgrounds that themselves are uncertain, and graduated in shape and detail. Sometimes these backgrounds seem to show the partial details of features and faces. Across each postcard painting lays another reality – the numerological one. Vetrova has also used numerically arranged details – i.e. five pearls, seven seashells, eight fish, five "double pearls" to indicate a theme. There seems to be much of the suit of Cups in her work. There is much water.

At Noon

For example, in the work "At Noon", the poem (by Basho) is as follows:

The burning Sun
Sunk in the sea
by the Mogami river.

One notices, in the painting side of this work, three (seeds) upon the body. At Noon suggests sensuality and orgasm – surrendering to the senses. The best of everything occurs at Noon.

Like a number of other Vancouver painters I have interviewed, Vetrova is very versatile in her skill. In her case, it is the result of her sound classical training. She says that, whether one is painting in a classical or in a modern style, certain things must be reflected in the painting – composition, line, colour, perspective, balance etc.

Her teachers at the Stroganov Academy of Art told her, and she feels it to be true, that a successful artist must be well educated. Natalia Vetrova is very educated – and very hard-working. She takes commissions and is quite able to paint in any style required. All the great ones have had this ability – starting right from Michelangelo, I suppose. Like that great master did on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, she has done on some ceilings in Vancouver.

There are four prints she gave me and I spent a lot of time contemplating them. In each case, they are beautiful and sensual. The combination of colour and feature she has chosen in each case perfectly catches the essence of the title she gave to each painting – and more! In a painting like "At Noon", the work is fully saturated with July. Looking at it, I just feel the heat, the sensuality of summer in a July shade. She had felt a spontaneity when she was creating these four pieces. Vetrova, regarding how she arrived at the painting At Noon, said "Sometimes the name is first, sometimes the color. The last works have been more abstract, [have] more space for the emotions."

"There were no sketches, no structure," she added.

Of these four "Poetry Paintings" one is called "Ama – Daughter of the River" – a piece which contains a touch of the astrological. All along the left edge, there are astrological creatures – some more distinct than others. I asked her if she had intentionally painted those features or did they "just happen"?

Ama – Daughter of the River – The five pearls symbolize creativity, the fecundity of women

"This was an image from a dream one night of white-skinned women diving into the deep blue waters in search of luminescent pearls. "I remembered it from a book I had read. It's a nice theme for the artist - the Japanese pearl divers." The four prints she gave me had a numerological aspect to them. When I asked her if she was able to tell me why the Number 3 is associated with "At Noon", Number 5 with "Ama, Daughter of the river", Number 7 with "Water" and Number 8 with "Reflection", she replied, "Three for me means stability, five is for creativity, seven is for happiness and eight for continuation. Later I read about numbers and their meanings and found that my associations were not too wrong,"

(Author’s Note: this is interesting because in The Tarot the minor arcana card known as the Eight of Rods is about the passage of time.)

More of Natalia Vetrova’s fine work can be viewed at www.vetrovastudio.com