Conversations with Sasha Gassel

First of all, Sasha mentions that art is a form of communication with a different type of vocabulary, one that doesn’t use words. Among elements of grammar of art are the following: colors, combination of colors, lines. For example, lines can be static or dynamic depending on how the artist chooses to use them. Artists also consider brush techniques to determine the motion, direction and energy in a work of art. Rhythm is the visual beat found in artwork. Also, artists are as concerned with perspective or space in their works as they are with color or form. To sum up this part of Sasha’s talk, art can be presented in different forms, depending on color, shades, the number of layers of paint used, technique, and lines. Because of different colors and shades, art is never the same. It varies depending on technique, color, shades, and layers. Of course, this depends on the method used, and this is especially true with impressionism.
Second, Sasha brings an example of Osip Mandelshtam’s “Conversation About Dante,” where Sasha found a good description of how music of words is transmitted into the poetic symbols, and how each instrument develops and changes when an entire orchestra is playing. Sasha says, for example, when an artist hears the trombone is playing he would fill in the canvas with the red. He also emphasizes the importance of color psychology as a determinant of human behavior.
Sasha was born in Moscow, USSR in 1947. He told about his post-war childhood? his life in a Moscow communal apartment that his family shared with 50 other neighbors, and described physical and emotional hardships he endured. He started drawing as early as three years old when he was visiting a village with his parents. At age 5, his parents enrolled him in a professional art school that had high-level art teachers who used to draw with Malevich, Chagall, Kandinsky, and others. Because many of these well-known painters were not allowed to have their art shows, they taught in art schools, developing new talented artists. — Roland

In the 1960s, Sasha Gassel entered an art university (which was called the Pedagogical Institute) and not thinking of any other profession except art. The studies were conducted in French, which is humorous considering the school was in Russia. The education was rigorous, beginning at around 8:30 AM and lasting until about 4 PM. At the time, Russian schooling was done in a per-revolutionary style, with students being taught composition, sculpturing, how to draw in pencil, and different types of media, such as grisaille (painting in shades of grey), gouache, egg tempera, etching, clay, oil. Subjects included but were not limited to interior, portraits, still life and scenery. There were several small villages near the university where biologists would run experiments and art students would learn en plein air painting techniques in the summers.
Then Sasha made a digression turned out to bear directly upon the issue at hand. He briefly discussed a case of Marc Chagall who welcomed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and was recognized as a great artist in the new socialist state for organizing art schools, and creating many large-scale public projects. Sasha also elaborated on the tool of Socialist realism as a genre characterized by optimistic pictures of Soviet life painted in a realist style. He also explored the topic of professional organizations (such as the Union of Soviet Artists founded in 1930 that existed prior to the Artists’ Union of the USSR) that served artists, until they were dismissed or closed down as they did not conform to government standards. Consequentially, many well-known artists left the county. — Roland