"In the dark"

(collage painting on cardboard, 30X40, 2005)

"For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art."
Edvard Munch

"A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself."
Edvard Munch

This painting is my take on "The Scream", although my variation depicts an internal scream, (or 'a scream of the soul' as Russians call it). As someone who prefers to practice restrain when it comes to public displays of emotions I felt that my interpretation of "the Scream" would be truer to my personality if I portrayed it with just a stare.

Phlegmatic by nature I was never big on drama. Drama begets drama and life is too short to concentrate on negative things. Although I grew up with a grandmother who was the grandmaster of drama and who could've made Sarah Bernhardt jealous if she were able to see the theatrics displayed by my grandmother whenever we were fighting she also taught me how to find humor in everything.

Once we would stopped fighting I could always count on having a good laugh about whatever was said in the heat of the moment, which made my childhood into a very amusing dramedy. It also laid a foundation for my mental strength as an adult. I feel that nowadays people don't teach their children about the importance of getting over things. Everything is over-dramatized. Everything scars for life. Everybody ends up in therapy. At least half of the people I meet remind me of the person in Munch's "The Scream". Anxious, stressed out and on a verge of a nervous breakdown they could benefit from remembering that for thousands of years humans struggled with the same issues as we do today and somehow everyone miraculously survived without happy pills or therapy.