They Don’t Like to Joke

Olga Kovtun

Its characteristic remains the ability to combine the density of intellectual reflection with an extraordinary sense of levity, measure and irony, together with the question of the great themes of existence — the other, life, love, death — boiling into the concreteness of things, feelings and situations…

I prefer the ridiculousness of writing poems rather than the ridiculousness of not writing them. I don’t cultivate great philosophy, but modest poetry. Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious, and they don’t like to joke. In excessive seriousness I always see something that is a bit funny.

— Wisława Szymborska

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I have intelligence. I have an extensive plastic culture, but when I’m going to start work none of that interests me. Then I strip off my knowledge; drawing, drawing, I detach from the world and also simplify myself until I only have the hand of a brush and my instinct. Those are the tools that allow me to find the ways that are waiting for me in a corner of reality.

When I work I don’t utter a word, I don’t think: I transform into a kind of prey animal willing to hunt shapes. As soon as I catch them, I transfer them to the cloth that, by its whiteness, by its nakedness, terrifies me. To diminish that sensation I stain the canvas to a point where the key to a plastic idea…