Marina Korenfeld, January 2010

Marina Korenfeld was born in Odessa, Ukraine to a musician father and a dramatist mother. Her home was visited by artists, musicians, actors, comedians, and poets,  creating an atmosphere that shaped and prepared her for a life in the arts.  At Odessa’s Theater and Art College, Marina majored in puppetry, “an absolutely marvelous experience in a hard-working environment”. At the college, Marina also studied  Classical Figure Drawing, Portraiture, Watercolor, Oil Painting, and the history of art and theater. One of Marina’s puppet creations was selected for Odessa’s Art Gallery, its largest museum.

Ten days after her graduation in 1992, Marina’s family immigrated to the U.S., where she was soon accepted into the School of Visual Arts, earning her B. A. in Fine Arts in 1996. These were the years of great discoveries: Gustav Klimt, Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Picasso’s Blue Period, and his pen and ink drawings. Of contemporary artists, she favored Remedios Varo, Anne Bachelier, and Loraine Vail. She began making weekly visits to the Metropolitan Museum to sketch and draw the works of Rodin and the Roman and Greek sculptors.

The development of Korenfeld’s style and artistic philosophy was influenced not only by the Great Masters, but also by the literary works of Carlos Castaneda, Herman Hesse, Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Garcia Marquez, and Victor Pelevin, all of which confirmed her vision of the mystical power and complexity of the human psyche.

As an artist and creative thinker, Marina was deeply convinced that every human being has latent creative potential –  and childhood, the time of imaginative whimsy, is the most auspicious moment to develop this potential. Together  with mother and her husband Eli, Marina created “IDEA” – an aesthetic Center for children. Through lessons in visual art and Russian literature, as well as frequent trips to theaters and museums of New York City and also abroad (Rome, Prague, Berlin, Barcelona). Marina and her colleagues taught the children to be original thinkers, to probe the mysteries of their identity through making art, to approach daunting social and personal dilemmas through creative problem-solving and humor.

Since 1992,  Korenfeld has shown her work at the Odessa City Gallery (Ukraine); at the Golden Street Gallery in New London CT in 2002;  at the York Square Gallery in New Haven, CT in 2003;  in New York City, at  the National Arts Club,  the “IDEA” Aesthetic Center, the Credit Suisse First Boston Corp., at the Students’ Art League, and in 2003 at Benedetti Gallery in SOHO, and in 2004 at the Cork Gallery/Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center after receiving a Merit Scholarship; at Casa Frela Gallery (NYC) in 2005; at Red Carpet Gallery in 2006 (NYC); at Agni Gallery and New City Theater Gallery (NYC) in 2008; at Mercer Group, SPCTCLR VWS and Cocoabar (NYC) in 2009.

Marina lives on Staten Island, NY with her husband Eli Bezimansky, who is also an artist and a teacher at “IDEA” with their sons Leo (4 years old) and Roman (2years old).

Marina’s etching, “Myth,” appears in the latest issue of Redivider, volume 7, issue 1.

Web site: http://arslonga.freeservers.com/
E-Mail:marinakorenfeld@gmail.com
azothgallery.com/…/marina_korenfeld.html

________________________________________________

The Particularity of the Moment

An Interview by Art Editor Anne Vickman.

Marina Korenfeld was kind enough to respond to a few questions over email.

Redivider: What gets the creative process started for you when it comes to creating a new piece of art?

Marina Korenfeld: It is the particularity of the moment. Don’t you love those moments which lead to a new dimension of reality? When routine life is no more because you start to pay attention and notice something interesting or particular about your surroundings. These moments happen to us pretty often. Once you alter your mindset and break out of habitual patterns of perception, you notice a child in an amusing hat, a woman impossibly tall, a bearded man clutching an unusual case. Other moments of creative surprise occur when we are betrayed by our senses: at the park, you suddenly see an antique brooch someone had lost in the grass. Elated with such a lucky find, you watch its emeralds gleaming in the sun; dashing over to the brooch, you find…a piece of broken glass from a beer bottle.  But the most valuable of these “profane illuminations” occur when I notice how often the details of my own life coincide with the private stories of the literary characters in the book I’m currently reading. These coincidences really amuse me: if I read a description of a room and it mentions a clock, most likely this clock will show the hour of my present moment. Pretty recently, I was reading Lowboy [by John Wray], where one of the characters has lived in the United States for sixteen years, just like I had done.  The action takes place on November 11th; it’s interesting to note that the book was a present from my sister Natalya, whose birthday is on November 11th (she hadn’t read the book and was unaware of this coincidence). So, to answer your question about the creative process, something unusual needs to happen to me to get it going. A small miracle or adventure. And it always does.

RDR: Being creative can be difficult…What is one of the most challenging aspects of being an artist?

MK: One must be creative regardless of profession. To be a good doctor, you need to be creative, to find unexpected solutions to the problems at hand, to see every problem from an unusual angle (this is why Dr. House is so popular). To be a good lawyer, teacher, financial advisor, computer programmer – you need to be creative. As in any other profession, an artist needs to be engaged, needs to be able to learn and to grow, needs to be observant. What makes artists unique from others, then? Though making art is what the artist prefers to do, it is far from her only profession. This means that you must be fairly organized; instead of frittering away your free time before the TV or the computer, you should devote it to your art. And not do this on a fluke, once in a blue moon, but rather, to have a rigorous schedule, when everyone, and most importantly you, know that you’re not available, that the phone is turned off and no one is welcome in your studio. I’m very lucky being a member of the Art Student’s League of New York, an oasis for artists with a great atmosphere. And cell phones are not allowed!

RDR:What are you working on now? Do you have any upcoming exhibitions?

MK: I’m working on a new etching about a man and a woman: my interpretation of the Yin and the Yang. Or maybe it’s just an etching of me and my husband. We’re both artists but our creative process is different, which is really cool: we work together with kids, we have two kids of our own, we get commissioned to paint murals together, we read the same books and watch the same movies, yet his drawings and sculptures are always a surprise to me. No matter how well we may know each other, our art shows how far we are from fully grasping the intricate world of someone else’s psyche.

I could say I have a permanent exhibition running here in NYC at “Cocoa Bar”. My friend the owner of this popular coffee shop in Brooklyn (Park Slope) and Manhattan (Lower East Side) invited me and Eli (my husband) to exhibit in both locations over a year ago. Well, the public response to my work was so great that he asked us to stay there indefinitely–I sold so much of my art that sales at the cafe couldn’t be compared to sales at any art gallery.

RDR: You work with children at your IDEA center. What has been rewarding in sharing art with kids?

MK: Working with the kids I embrace two roles. They are different: the role of the teacher and the role of the artist. As a teacher I feel completely fulfilled: many of our students, who came to us as puny 5-8 year-olds with serious plans to become lawyers (for mucho money) or pro-wrestlers (for fame), decided to enroll in the best art colleges of the east coast to become illustrators and cultural anthropologists. And in May of 2009 I participated in the exhibition SPCTCLR VWS, which juxtaposed the work of artists with that of their mentors. When my students invited me to the exhibition, I was fiercely proud of theirwork, since we really like those who make us feel good about ourselves.

I think that older people enjoy spending time with children in order to absorb their energy. Older people often lack this energy, while children have it in full. I can’t imagine teaching adults with the same degree of engagement that I apply to teaching children. Adults need praise; you need to be sensitive to their self-importance, being careful lest you offend them with a trivial comment. With kids, though, I can be sincere – I can praise them or criticize them – for they can always tell when you’re lying or being facetious. Very attentively I listen to their judgments, associations, and trends – for no one can feel and experience the fabric of reality with the subtlety of those who haven’t yet turned 21. For an artist hardly creates anything herself; like a child hunting dragonflies, she snatches forms and ideas drifting in the ether…

RDR: You seem very entrenched in the world of arts and culture. What music are you listening to these days? Are you reading any good books?

MK: I really enjoy the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaire, Inna Zhelannaya’s Russian folk songs with electronics, B.G.- a Russian rock star who is the father of Russian Buddhism, 5′NIZZA, Depeche Mode, Dead Can Dance, Les Negresses Vertes.

The last book that left a big impression on me was The Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque. This book is about the life of German refugees during World War II. I’m firmly convinced that it should be part of the required school curriculum. Among the books I read recently and really liked was Lowboy by John Wray, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, [and] The Sex Lives of Cannibals by Martin Troost. Recently I’ve discovered a lot of great new Russian authors, who I believe will make a great classics list in the future: D. Bykov, A. Gelasimov, V. Pelevin, T. Tolstaya, D. Rubina, L. Ulitskaya.

RDR: Your bio mentions that the books you have read confirmed “her vision of the mystical power and complexity of the human psyche.” What is your vision of the human psyche?

MK: There is a scene in Mikhail Bulgakov’s widely popular novel Master and Margarita where Woland (Satan) meets his opponent Berliotz (or rather, his head) at Satan’s Ball and proves that whatever you believe in is exactly what will happen to you in the afterlife. And this is an example of what I think of as the mystical powers of the human psyche. Our belief mechanism is what makes us who we are: if we love ourselves, then people love us.What occurs to us in our life actually depends on us  – I don’t mean the plans we make and the goals we accomplish. Rather, I’m talking about serendipity, wondrous coincidences, unexpected changes in the trajectory of life. I think that we attract certain events into the orbit of our life and thus construct our own reality. Someone who believes in aliens, God, the devil or in a conspiracy theory will find all kinds of evidence and supporting material for her belief; someone who believes that he is generally unlucky will always find evidence of that as well.  And what about the mantra “Think positive”? Who doubts the power of that? Seriously, I lament that we’re spending such gigantic sums of money on exploring space. The most remote — mysterious — incomprehensible cosmos is the inner world of each and every one of us and the unexplored mystical powers that reside within each and every one of us.

RDR: Did you make any New Year’s resolutions for 2010?

MK: I’d like to learn how to drive a car:)

1/1/2010

Happy New Year!