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Unhappy Birthday

By Boris Bernstein

Let us not forget that life remains the starting point for art. Moreover, everything starts with drawing. It is not an accident that the father of art history, the wise Giorgio Vasari, for the lack of a generic term to unite painting, sculpture, and architecture, brought them under the umbrella of arti del disegno, the art of drawing. Once in a while, Maria Kazanskaya draws from life, whether to keep in shape or when painting is not an option, -- but mostly for the sake of making drawings. There are subjects that are often at hand, such as flowers on the table; there's a model that's always with the artist: her own face. It so happened that when she hurt her foot, confinement turned into a pretext to create a series of self-portraits. Another series held together by the sameness of the model and developed into a number of different characters or incarnations.