What do you listen to when you’re painting?

Readers who have visited my website will know that I wear two hats - occasionally simultaneously but more often one at a time! Recently I've been very busy with my artist hat on, and my writer's hat has been stuck on the peg for longer than I'd like. I'm hoping to clear my desk in the next couple of weeks to put together an update on the state of the Russian economy and how it's been impacted by the war in Iran. But in the meantime, here's a little article I have written for the latest newsletter of the Cornwall Watercolour Society:

Chatting with some of the other Cornwall Watercolour Society artists a few weeks ago, the discussion turned to what we listen to when we paint. Classical music maybe, or Radio 4? I felt a little reluctant to join the conversation, for my response is a little unconventional. 

I listen to podcasts about the war in Ukraine. Yes, while working on local scenes of fishing harbours or rolling hills, in my mind’s eye are the battle-scarred killing fields of the Donbas. I lead something of a double life: as a mixed-media and watercolour artist exhibiting across Cornwall, and a writer and blogger chronicling Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Many of my blog posts look into aspects of the war in a historical context, often making comparisons with incidents in Russian or Soviet history - mainly the Second World War or the earlier Russian Civil War of 1917-22. It’s an area of interest for me that goes back decades. I studied Russian at university, with a particular focus on Russian History, and later went on to work as a journalist covering the energy industry in Russia and the former Soviet Union. 

My blog also delves into Ukrainian Jewish history - one of my specialist areas (my undergraduate dissertation, back in the early 1990s, was about the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel). My interest stems in part from my own family history: my grandmother was born into a Jewish family in a village near Kyiv around the turn of the last century. She lived through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War that followed, as well as pogroms and famine, before finally escaping to safety in Canada, and later the USA.

Some years ago, I wrote a book telling the story of my Grandma and her family. I’m very lucky that my family stories have been passed down through the generations, and not lost in the midsts of time. I have my Dad to thank for that: back in the 1970s, when Grandma was an old lady, Dad made recordings – in Yiddish – on old cassette tapes of her telling stories about her childhood and youth. I always knew of the existence of these tapes, but I don’t know Yiddish, and as a youngster I had never been sufficiently interested to ask Dad about them. 

Then when I was studying for a Masters in Russian History, I thought it might be interesting to write a dissertation about the Russian Civil War, which I knew Grandma had lived through. It was then that I asked my Dad if he would translate the tapes for me. Hour after hour, we listened to Grandma telling her tales in Yiddish; Dad translated and I typed. I was simply gobsmacked by the stories the crackly old cassettes revealed. I had absolutely no idea what my grandmother and her family had gone through. At that point I decided to ditch the dissertation, and the Masters, and set about turning Grandma’s story into a book.

You can find the book on Amazon

Or follow my blog

If you’d like to hear what I listen to when I’m painting, I recommend this podcast

And here's a link to The Cornwall Watercolour Society

Photos: 
1. Grandma (standing centre) with her mother, sister and brother (circa 1904)
2. Grandma (standing left) with her two sisters during the Civil War (circa 1920)
3. Grandma (third from left) with her husband, siblings and their spouses, and their grandmother in Canada (circa 1925)
4. Grandma in the 1970s in Los Angeles