Mark’s Remarks at Vera’s Tryzna
A couple of days ago my aunt Vera passed away. My uncle and godfather, her husband asked me to say something at the funeral. To be honest with you, I was really nervous because I wasn’t as close to her as to some of my other aunts and uncles, but I of course obliged. And the embarrassing truth is that I didn’t even know how much this woman meant to me until I sat down and started writing about her. This is what I read at the funeral today. I was shaking from the moment I stepped up to the podium. I cried through the whole thing. I hope it doesn’t always take such a loss to discover meaning in life but I am grateful for it nonetheless and I pledge to write more if it leads to this kind of awakening, inspiration, understanding, hope and faith. Thank you Teta Vera. Вічная память.
Vera (“Faith”)
I have to apologize if I get a bit emotional while I’m up here. But I have a good excuse – I’m an artist. Most of you know me as the artist in the family, but I always saw myself as the other artist. Long before I just up and decided that I would be a musician in my 20’s, there was Vera, who lived and breathed it every day as some of you have alluded to earlier. She was my point of reference for what an artist was, and it was actually only after reflecting upon it in the past few days that I realized how important that point of reference was and continues to be for me.
See, Dan and I used to go over to vujko Andrij’s and teta Vera’s every Saturday for art lessons. They lived in a townhouse on High Park just down the street from where Lev and his family live, from where Marichka and me and our family now live. I remember that narrow hallway with the kitchen on the left and the stairs to the basement on the right, where everything that they now have in their basement was crammed into a space about 1/10th the size. At the end of the hallway were 3 steps that led to a big open space with glass walls. It was the room with the most natural light and the place teta Vera chose for our lessons while vujko made chili with way too much garlic in the next room, just above us. We atarted with fruit – simple natural objects that I later learned she never lost her infatuation for. She’d put a pear in front of us and just say “go” without much direction at all, actually. And much like 5 year old Lev’s drawings of horses in the fogged up windows, I’m certain that what we produced didn’t even come close to resemble the fruit laid there in front of us. But it didn’t matter – our lesson always ended with amazement and awe and love and support for what our tiny naïve minds created. See, the point wasn’t to reproduce the piece of fruit on the table. For her, it was an exersize in imagination. She was getting us to understand that we could create our own reality – a reality that took inspiration from the things around us but that could eventually enter the realm of the unfathomable. It started with pears and forks and chairs, but in no time, she had us painting oceans we had never seen before. Decades before Dan even succumbed to the desire to pick up a surf board and be one with the tides of the planet, teta Vera got him to imagine it in water colour. To give you a sense of how formative that moment was for Dan, that painting still hangs on his wall after all these years. And when we all reached the limits of our artistic abilities, which she would never admit was possible, teta Vera picked up where we left off. She travelled to places the rest of us only dreamed of and created exhibits to share the magic she found there. In her artist statement for one of her exhibits that I recently read, what struck me the most was that she always tried to find a way to make her experiences accessible to us non artists. She didn’t make art for art’s sake. She made art in an attempt to deepen our understanding of the world around us and widen the boundaries of our realities. In a single exhibit you couldfind Pueblo shamans inspired by her trip to the deserts of Arizona next to angels she imagined while listening to the ancient chorus of monks singing mass at Pecherska Lavra in Kyiv, next to – a bowl of pears. She somehow managed to marry her cultural heritage with her inspiration for discovering new worlds while never forgetting where it all started. And that’s something, thanks to her, I internalized as an artist before I even knew I was an artist. Now let me ask a question – how many of you have one of Vera’s paintings in your house? (majority of the room raises their hands). I know that the Pueblos found a home at Dark’s, the shaman lives in Lev’s living room, her purple fan is at the cottage in Muskoka, Zdana and Roma each have an angel and a pear. We have Totem number 5 in our hallway. Let me tell you something – you know what the amazing thing about artists is? It may seem self-evident, but long after they are gone, their art remains. And that art is something they imagined, created, nurtured, and then let go, sometime reluctantly and sometime happily, but always with the understanding that they were letting go of a piece of themselves. Those pieces aren’t dresses or vanities or even favorite embroidered tablecloths. They are pieces of her. And they are literally all around us.
You know, after Lev’s speech yesterday, it occurred to me that every day my daughter Maya passes Totem number 5, which hangs in our narrow corridor, which is not unlike the hallway in that High Park townhouse. And even though she will probably not remember who teta Vera was, there will come a time when she learns enough words to ask “what’s that”? and I’ll have the chance to tell her about her great aunt the artist, who sat at the end of the hall in the room with glass walls and the most natural light, about the Pueblos and about Ukraine, the country of angels where her mother was born, and if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll be able to convince her to sit down with me at the kitchen table with a sketch pad and some crayons and the two of us can draw pears together while I try to hold back tears of gratitude and she imagines surfing oceans she hasn’t seen yet.
