Slides That Follow Your Voice: Ukrainian Accent Gallery Opening

Slide 1: Verba Blue

0:17Good evening, and thank you for coming. Please come closer, the paintings do not bite, and the wine is behind you, so there is no reason to stand by the door. No? Okay. They really do not bite.

0:30My name is Andriy, I am the curator of this exhibition, and for the next ten minutes I want to tell you about a woman called Halyna Verba, who painted the same river for fifty-one years, and whose work you are standing among tonight for the uh, the first time anywhere.

0:47Here is what we know. She was born in nineteen thirty, thirty-one, in a village on the Styr, which is not a famous river, and she trained for two years at the art school in the regional capital before leaving, for reasons nobody in her family could explain to me, except that her mother was ill and somebody had to come home. She came home. She taught drawing at the village school for thirty-eight years.

Slide 2: What we know

1:11And every morning before school, and every evening after it, she walked four hundred metres to the same bend in the river and painted it. The same bend. In every month, every light, every state of the water. We have forty-six of those paintings in this room. Forty-seven. One is still with the conservator. Forty-six on the walls. Her niece believes there were more than six hundred.

Slide 3: 46 paintings in this room

1:37I want to be honest about how they survived, because it is not a heroic story. They were in a cupboard. [laughs] Specifically, they were in two wardrobes and under a bed in the house of her niece, Lesia, who is here tonight, and who kept them because throwing away your aunt's life's work is a difficult thing to do on a Tuesday, and so she never did.

Slide 4: Two wardrobes, and under a bed

1:59In twenty twenty-two a roof leak reached the top of one wardrobe and damaged nine canvases, and Lesia called the regional museum to ask what to do, and the regional museum called me, and I drove four hours expecting to be polite about some amateur landscapes. Polite is not what happened. I sat on the floor of that bedroom for three hours.

Slide 5: 2022: a roof leak, 9 canvases

2:24Lesia brought me tea at some point. I did not drink it. She brought another. I did not drink that either. She has told me since that she thought I was unwell, and considered calling someone, and decided whatever I had was not contagious. She is nodding. Yes. Where was I. The blue.

2:45Look at the blue. Please, go and look at the one on the far wall, number thirty-one, November nineteen eighty-seven. She had no money for good pigment for most of her life, and so she mixed her own, from what she could get, and the blue in that painting is a blue I have not seen anywhere else, and our conservator, who has worked on paintings for twenty-nine years, spent a week trying to identify it before she gave up and simply wrote, Verba blue, in the report.

Slide 6: Verba blue: number 31, November 1987

3:14It is in the report now.

3:16Look at, look at the, the water. Look at the water. She painted the same bend six hundred times, and in not one of these forty-six does the water look the same, because she was not painting a view. She was painting the day, was painting the day. You can tell the wind direction. You can tell, in some of them, the temperature, and I do not know how, and neither does the conservator.

Slide 7: She was painting the day

3:41What I want you to take from tonight is not that we found a lost master. I do not know if she was a master. I know that she was a person who paid attention to one thing for fifty-one years, completely, and that this room is what that looks like, and that it is rare, and that it was nearly lost to a leaking roof and a busy Tuesday. [sighs]

Slide 8: Not a lost master

4:05I should say, the roof is fixed. The museum paid. It is the only roof the museum has ever paid for on a private house, and the director signed the form without reading it, because I was standing over him, let us say. I would do it again. That is all.

4:21The exhibition runs for eleven weeks. The catalogue is by the door, twelve pages of it are Lesia's memories, and they are the best twelve pages in it. Lesia, would you stand?

Slide 9: Go and look at the blue

4:34Thank you. Thank you for the wardrobe. And for the tea. Both. I am sorry about the tea. Please, everybody, go and look at the blue.