Games People Play – Interview with Myself
Dear All! Save the Date: Games People Play. My first, official, legitimate art show is coming up on May 31, 2026.
You might be wondering: WHAT will I see? HOW shall I plan for it? WHY in the world are you putting yourself through this (again)?
To answer all the burning questions, I have sat down with myself for this exclusive, insightful, and highly informative interview to help everyone plan, prepare, understand, and get very, very, very excited, as is only possible when chickens and other four legged creatures begin appearing on the horizon.
The poster for Games People Play art show.
Me: Thank you so much for taking time out of your insane schedule to talk to me. Are you ready for the show?
Myself: Hahahahahahahahahahaha. I am about half way done. There are about twenty separate components and nothing is entirely prepared. But yes, I am excited.
Me: Tell me about some of the components.
Myself: First, there will be 5-6 new paintings on wood panel. A few smaller ones are finished, but I am working on the last four. Since paintings don’t get made on schedule, but it’s a responsive process, I have no idea if they’ll be ready for the show. The idea in each painting usually changes a few times during the process, and is typically outside of my control, so I am both worried about time and excited to see what these pieces reveal to me. I always learn something unexpected from finished paintings.
Me: Can you share some details about the paintings in progress?
Myself: One of them is inspired by Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal. It’s one of the inspirations behind the title of the show, playing games with Life and Death. Another one is about Time; I am making a version of the clock on the facade of the children’s puppet theater in Moscow. I went there regularly as a child to see all the puppet shows, and the clock had twelve doors and windows that opened up and all the little characters and animals came out at noon. It was such a magical treat to see it each time.
These days I see all the things I loved so much about my Moscow childhood as if they are obscured by a thick piece of glass with endless cracks and debris stuck in it; so I am making a painting about the theater clock in which each character has turned into a monster.
“The Seventh Seal,” Ingmar Bergman, 1957
Me: Sounds exciting and depressing. But what’s another component?
Myself: The other medium in the show will be silkscreen prints. Silkscreening is relatively new to me. I went back to the printmaking studio at MassArt and have taken the continuing education class three times with Carlos Alvarez. There’s an amazing community in that class with many students who take the class each semester and make some incredible art. Being a part of that space has been a really powerful experience and I am in love with the screenprinting process. I finished an edition of a print that illustrated a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke and now I am working on a really large print illustrating a Daniil Kharms poem that I translated.
How Shall I Hold My Soul After Rilke. Silkscreen print, 22x24 inches, 2025
Me: What’s the Rilke poem?
Myself:
“Liebes-Lied” (Love Song)
How shall I hold my soul that it may notBe touching yours? How shall I lift it then
Above you to where other things are waiting?
Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all forgot,
With some lost thing the dark is isolating
On some remote and silent spot that, when
Your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.
You and me – all that lights upon us though,
Brings us together like a fiddle bow
Drawing one voice from two strings, it glides along.
Across what instrument have we been spanned?
And what violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest song.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1907
I had this poem filed away for a long time and then it came back to the surface during a lesson taught by one of my students in a college art education class. The objective of the lesson was to identify a set of personal inspirations and find a theme that unifies them. For my list of inspirations I wrote down this poem, Mozart’s requiem, and Maurice Sendak’s book Kenny’s Window. And the unifying theme I thought connected these three inspirations was “the soul”. The second I wrote it down I kind of wanted to throw up because it’s so pretentious, but I also loved it.
This poem is the closest description I ever found of what it feels to connect to another mind. Like connecting on multiple levels - intellectually, spiritually, creatively, emotionally. When creative people connect, there’s a possibility of going to this place where you stand at the edge of an abyss but a connection to another person lets you keep a balance and take creative leaps across it.
It was also fun to go back to Rilke because I got so much positive feedback for my etching I made years ago about Rilke visiting Tolstoy, I felt his essence at the print studio while working on this.
Me: Can you expand on the topic of the soul being pretentious and vomit inducing?
Myself: I can try… The soul is one of those metaphysical entities that we take quite seriously — I mean entire religions are built around the idea of what happens to the soul after death. Eddie Izzard has a wonderful segment called “Looking Cool” that I quote quite often; he mentions how James Dean made the matchstick-in-the-corner-of-the-mouth-lean-against-the-wall look very cool. But add another matchstick in the other corner of the mouth - eerggh! You look like an idiot. Making art about the soul is kind of like that.
There’s an extremely delicate balance that must be preserved because once you name it, you’ve failed. You have to come as close as possible to the edge of the idea without actually naming it or describing it. I actually think this is why so much contemporary art fails so badly — people name their purpose and intention and kill the idea in the process.
There are also really excellent examples of considering the soul — a direct one in the Faust stories, the long narrative in the Divine Comedy. And the more I learn about Judaism, the more I appreciate how strong and simultaneously vague the idea of the soul is, and how the focus is on life and what we do with what we have. I suppose this is what I am trying to do — connect to the spiritual, divine, inexplicable and magical within us with chickens and elephants and postcards. This is my way of making sense of those things.
Me: I want to go back to the abyss and creative collaborations. It sounds weird. Are you saying that you can’t be creative all by yourself?
Myself: Well, of course I can be creative by myself, but I think what makes artists who they are is the constant interaction with that that surrounds them. For some it’s ideas, for some it’s God, for some it's perfection of images of the things in their world, for some it’s continuation of great traditions, for some it’s the revolt against those traditions. For me, it’s all of those things plus a lot of humor.
For me, for better or worse, it’s about love. Wanting to connect to other humans on a deeper level, wanting to be loved, needing to transform love into a visual form. I know it’s not supremely cool, but I think this is why my art touches some people in a deeper way. That’s the greatest reward.
The Back and Forth Game is going to be another component of the art show. I am extremely excited about bringing this project to the next level. I got the idea years ago from one of my friends who was also my MassArt student teacher who was playing this game with John Crowe, a legendary educator and artist and my biggest role model both as a teacher and an artist. My student teacher and I played it in the classroom with all the students and each other — it was absolutely transformative and entirely changed my approach to my own work. The playfulness and the framework of the creative partnership is a great recipe . Playing it with about fifty people over the last year or so has been amazing. I now have this trusting and intimate connection with many people I barely knew before. It’s wonderful.
Me: So you got mixed media paintings, silkscreen prints, the back and forth game collaborative “gameboard” art — what else?
Myself: I am also making a chess set. While I don’t play chess, much of my early relationship with my father was defined by him neglecting me in favor of the game. He would take me to the park and leave me to my own devices while he played with other men there. Everyone had the same clock for playing speed chess, and they would smoke and bang away on the knobs on it while making fast moves. I would stand next to the wooden table in the park, my eyes just over the edge, watching, and secretly organizing the eaten pieces on the side of the table into families. And playing with them. I love how chess pieces look , the personalities, the roundness, the little beads on the crowns, the heaviness when you pick them up.
My chess set is pretty large, and made out of thick wood dowels (logs?). I initially wanted to carve each one, then realized that I don’t have the required skills, signed up for a woodworking class, then decided to just keep the cylinder shapes and dress them all up into super fancy characters using the billions of scraps of fabric and random objects and beads and buttons I have. I decided to channel Man Ray and steal his idea for the knights which he made from violin scrolls; so I also used violin scrolls for the knights except I attached them to the cylinders at a different angle and they actually look like long horse faces. The main thing about my chess set is that the pieces are neither black nor white and while they stand in their correct positions on the chess board there’s no way to tell which piece belongs to which side.
The chess set obviously connects to the Seventh Seal, to my childhood, to the idea of Games, to the back and forth game, and indirectly to Alice in Wonderland.
Me: Ah! You’ve mentioned Mozart, I was wondering when Alice would come up.
Myself: You know me too well! Yes, there will be an Alice component, it will be amazing, a collaboration with another artist, a project in progress, but I can’t talk about it yet. Stay tuned.
Me: Sounds good. Is that it?
Myself: There will be at least one sashiko embroidered tapestry. I take it with me everywhere I go, and when I get a few minutes here or there I add as many stitches as I can. That one features wolves and some other creatures. I really like it.
"Ukrainian Chicken," sashiko and embroidery on linen, 2022 (Chickens)
Me: So wolves. That’s kind of new, no? We all know about mice and elephants, I remember the brief aardvark phase, the grim reaper is in most of your work, four legged chickens, obviously. Where did the wolf come from?
Myself: Well, in a funny way the wolf was there at the very beginning. He was in the very first dream I remember from when I was probably three years old. My mom and dad and I shared a room in an apartment, and they would put me to bed and hang out in the kitchen. One night I remember waking up, seeing the light from the hallway expand as the door to the room slowly opened — like in a film noir. Then a tall figure walked into the beam of light. He was wrapped in a cape, or maybe a long coat, and had a mushroom shaped hat on; the shadow fell over his face and I couldn’t see it. I said “Who are you?” And he responded “I am the wolf!” I got super scared and screamed for my parents. That’s all I remember.
"Ты кто? Я волк!" (“Who are you? I’m the wolf!”) mixed media on wood panel, 48 x 48 inches, 2022
But since then the wolf has been with me. The first time he formally appeared in my art was in the 2023 painting called “I Am The Wolf” that I made for the exhibition called Dreamscapes which also happened at the Wedeman Gallery, like my upcoming show. I copied the wolf almost verbatim from illustrations by a brilliant Russian children's book picture maker named Viktor Vasnecov. He illustrated many Russian books for children. I loved his art as a kid and it made a significant impact on my personal style.
Last year I was making examples of cardboard puppets for my students. Mine were on the theme of Little Red Riding Hood, and I made all the characters, but the wolf came out the best. The timing coincided with some difficult moments in my professional life, and I had the strong sense that the wolf came into my life like a spirit guide to help me get through mire.
He began appearing on all my art, and then two wolves came together quite suddenly in a painting I made over an old etching. The two wolves in the painting are holding a cat’s cradle between them, but the way their hands are positioned they could be practicing push hands, which is a part of Tai Chi, something I used to do in my life, and something that is very meaningful to me. This piece is probably the key to the whole show — it’s all about the mystery, joy, pain, and possibilities born of a true human connection. The space between — you know? The space between notes in a piece of music, the space between a photographer and their subject, the time spent apart while missing another person, filing away things to tell them at the next meeting, this space of longing, possibility, magic, the contemplation of the great unanswerable questions, the rituals we go through to bring meaning into those empty spaces — but then the pure, impossible joy of connection and being on the same wavelength — this is the core of where the ideas for my art are coming from.
“One friend is worth a thousand enemies” Acrylic paint on old etching, 12x18 inches, Fall 2025
Me: And I suppose this is why the piece made it into the New Year card this year!
Myself: Of course!
Me: Is that it for the show?
Myself: The last thing I want to make happen is a gift shop. This would be both for making some money to cover the cost of the show, but also for extending the game into another dimension.
I think it will be fun. I will sell prints, t-shirts, ceramics, and there will be a postcard rack like in a museum with postcards featuring the art of my artist friends. I always knew the art community around me was extraordinary, but this postcard set is AMAZING. It could be an art show in itself. I am actually really excited about some ideas I have about curating shows in the near future.
If there’s one great change I can observe in myself is just how much more the art of other people has become important to me, how much I love the art made by people I love. Just like teaching is a pursuit of love, curating and showing work by other artists allows connection that I am really craving in my life.
Me: That sounds really wonderful. Are you scared?
Myself: Terrified.
Me: So why do this?
Myself: Why do people do crazy things? Why do people travel, fall in love, go off to live in the woods, raise children…? This is what makes us human, the pursuit of things outside of basic survival. I think about this a lot - on one hand this is so basic, on the other hand it’s so complex. What scares me the most is that I don’t actually want to be the center of attention, so there’s a paradox, because nothing is more attention grabbing than doing exactly what I am doing, but I really want it to be about the work and especially about the ideas behind it. There are a few more components I will tell you about next time we talk.
Me: I am really looking forward to the next conversation. Would you be open to questions or comments from your friends and our readers?
Myself: I would love to have questions and comments and continue the discussion! Thank you so much! Until next time!
New Year 2026 Postcard, 2025
