Notes from worktable

I am away from my studio at the moment, so I don’t have my dear markers, my comfortable chair or, in the first place, the silence that I value a lot when I work. I don’t even have a proper sketchbook with me, and for a while this seemed like a good enough reason to…

When I was a child, my cousins and I would spend the whole summer in a small Qazaq village, an aul. Our uncle still lives in his house on the edge of that village, with endless steppe stretching behind its windows. It felt like living on the edge of the civilized world. Every day we…

Years ago, I remember giving advice to mothers who told me they wanted to draw but couldn’t find the time. “Draw while the baby is sleeping.” I had no idea what I was talking about. I thought the problem was time. Surely somewhere in the day there were twenty minutes that could be found for…