Piia Ausman: Art in my life – a true love

I am sitting in the gallery, in my office. There are pictures on the wall painted white. An unusually high number – 12 pieces – for a room of only a few dozen square metres. A gallerist’s workshop! There are some pictures I could not give up, there are some that were gifted to me. I am thinking that actually, there is room for some more. And there, propped against the wall are some pictures, waiting for someone or for me.

On the opposite wall, there is a tempera painting of Elmar Kits from the 1960s. That picture had no title, no inscriptions by the author other than the signature and date (1967). So I gave it a name – “Muses”. Half-abstract intertwined female figures in greenish-grey tones – some sitting, some standing –, the Muses of Elmar Kits and my thoughts. The Muses are looking at me, not in the eye, but somewhat differently, somewhere in my soul. I look back.

I stay silent until I hear the lute playing inside me – there’s a musical instrument on the picture. I bought this “Kits’ tempera” from Mrs Leida. Leida is gone, so is Elmar Kits, but the picture stays on. I met Leida years ago in Tartu, the autumnal weather was all foggy and rainy. Leida had some pictures she wanted to sell before she died so that her affairs were in order with the minister when the time came. Leida had no children, she had no one. No husband any more, although at one time she did. There was just one relative. Leida was going to die in December, so she said. It was September. Leida lived until early spring. In this picture, she is still alive with me. Leida is one of my most beautiful and soulful memories, a lovely woman with porcelain white skin, always spick and span, a light-coloured cotton print hat on her head, listening to classic music; we would often talk over the phone and I would visit her when in Tartu. As I was getting ready to leave, Leida would keep waving at me from the door of her flat in the apartment building and she would call out to me in a tinkling, sing-song voice, herself so happy: “Piia, bye-bye! Look here, a dying woman is waving at you! Maybe we’ll never meet again after today.” Leida was happy, she was always happy in her own way.

Our history, our world, our people. Emotional reflection of our own past in all those picture squares, windows that are open and in which you need to peek so as to understand yourself better, understand what has been, is or will be. Art maps the emotional history of mankind! It’s a big sentence, like a sunrise of Kristjan Raud’s painting from 1935 in which Kalev’s son is travelling to the North – but this is just as it is. Art paints emotions, feelings, sensations of what was once inside people and “in the air” to accompany the facts of history.

Very-very soon, on 17 November, the legendary exhibition of Elmar Kits of 1966 will be repeated in the grand hall of Tartu Art House. A restored version, displaying works that at the time created a frenzy of exaltation in art. Isn’t this a strange opportunity? Finding oneself in the past today, in a recovered event that is too valuable not to be repeated. I don’t think we should repeat the October revolution, but Kits’ exhibition – sure!

Something that happened in art at that time, is revived once again. How will society resonate this time? If Leida were alive, I would drive to Tartu and take her to the exhibition. I wonder – did Leida go to Kits’ 1966 exhibition? If I had known then what I know now, I would have asked her at the time. I would have asked her so many things, about art and everything else. I would have shown her an Elken picture on my office wall and I would have said, “You see, Mrs Leida, this is art in my life, like a song with the same title as the name of Elken’s picture – “True love”. Leida would have thought a long time about the picture. Elken did not think about me when painting the picture but it became a sign for me – art in my life, my true love. A big white abstraction, a room for thoughts and feelings, white, white in all of its shades.

Years ago when the gallery perhaps did not exist yet, yes, it did not, I wrote this poem:

A room painted in white on white,
I’m seeing the walls and the endless ceiling,
there are no colours to perceive,
I’m sitting and waiting for a beanstalk,
to sprout towards the skies.

It did – years and years later. Elken’s painting in my office is right behind the desk. And so I stroll through the art in my life, through my memories and people and associations that speak simultaneously to just me and to everybody else. Others who communicate with arts are similar strollers, on their own, in their own way but always feeling love for those creators who are painting our worlds of today, be they from here or from the past. Moments within yourself and in time. I could not have gone to Elmar Kits’ exhibition back in 1966, I was not even here then, but today I will go.

Thanks to art I can go somewhere that was before me. The world is open, we can board a plane and fly to the ends of the earth, or we can simply raise our hats, climb aboard ourselves and fly wherever we want, all made possible by the simple ability to love art, along with a wish to see and understand more. The world reaches me through art in a more sensitive way, in a different way, and this enchants me.

I am looking at Jaan Toomik’s “Children having a picnic”. My glance travels from the small coffee table, carpet and couch to the opposite wall – soft red tones, a gang of boys in baseball caps sitting on the whitish beach, the dark sea is farther away, a figure of a man is stepping into the sea, pale and naked – is this a generalisation, of the figure of the father of the boys having the picnic today, of someone who is standing between the sea and the children, with his back to the viewer? Or perhaps he is one of those little boys, now a man, somewhere in the future – different dimensions in boundless simplicity. I am thinking about my father; it was a strange relationship, he too was always somewhere far away while at the same time present, and then not. I take another look at my Toomik and I am haunted by a scene from Albert Camus’ autobiography, The First Man, in which the protagonist is standing on his father’s grave, much older than his once dead father ... Camus was an existentialist. Art’s dimension is always existential, helping to have big talks with oneself, in silence. The pictures we look at both provoke and project us and everything else. Big dimensions help retreat from the small world that always embraces you so wholly. Big dimensions create enchantments, where everything suddenly has a meaning, be it for just a moment – a genuinely good work of art is like an eternal moment.

What is Edasi?

Edasi is a web magazine for active people. Edasi is a journey. Edasi is a way of thinking. Edasi encourages and educates. Personal. Edasi has a positive and benevolent world outlook. The aim is to reflect life and different perspectives with the help of creative collaborators. To boost the number of encouraging acts and educating thoughts. Edasi is an opportunity and environment where a better Estonia can be created. A world to which as many people as possible would want to belong. Edasi is distinct among existing Estonian web channels in that it features a soothing design that facilitates the reading experience, values the reader as a human being, his or her time and does not encumber them with excessive torrents of information. Simple is beautiful. Secondly, the emphasis is on the content of the product. On the text. Pictures are important but they can unfold their full impact and stand out better if things are kept simple. Less is more.