GOLDEN, ENDLESS

Once, to express the Mystery of the existing beyond the limit, artists invented a trick to use gold. Background of icons covered with gold, goldish tinges of mosaic… Some special colour, some special effect: from one hand  -warm, glittering from inside, from another – remote as if alient to the Earth warm. The subject was the Divine Being…
The Artist we are going to tell about is a simple Earth creature with strong roots in reliable material world. But in a strange way common things from the material world on her canvas radiate this gold, inconceivable light. Paintings by Helen Illichova are filled with light, but it is not the Sun light. And it is not ancient “cryptography” of a candle. The light from Helen’s paintings comes from nowhere, the objects don’t vanish in the power of light. They are presented ponderously, rudely, visually – but at the same time they are irreal. The golden light  is their own unseparatable nature. That’s why each simpliest clay pot, each beanpod from those simple still lives bents to the symbol.
Though… there is nothing to be surprised with: if you spend a while with Helen Illichova, you will understand the nature of this “golden deepness”.
The nature of this artist is Nature itself. It is a deep, respectable attention to the world , serious and fixed look into the nature, - such a forgotten by many artists virtue!
Isn’t it the reason because of which “self-expression” has reached the priority in Arts. And the surrounding world is can be expressed by one who is learning… Learning from the Nature which is much more clever than we are.
Illichova is a person just like that: she isn’t ambitious, she doesn’t feel to be ashamed to learn. A drop of self-doubt, her searching for different kinds of manners in painting, and at last choosing one – the best –is also a part of her biography.
But each Helen’s step to the Art is her hard training and a new problem with a decision to use the existing abilities up to the end…All these abilities haven’t been exhausted. Even their owner doesn’t realize them quite well. Helen hasn’t told her determinant word about the world and about herself. In this incompleteness one can feel the hidden power: question “HOW” is not Helen’s question. She works out the problem ‘WHAT”.
The technique of the artist’s painting is difficult to confuse with somebody’s. Her “pagan” falling in love with the world of animate Nature and entering of hand made things deeply into the soul; the delight from the rudiment of colours and forms – all this breaks out on Helen’s canvas as myriad of golden glares; it flows as melting gold…
Heads of dried poppies and lanterns of winter cherries; an old coffee-pot and a pot made of clay – they all exist here in some special space: at least in the space of folk songs or myths. Helen’s world is so much concentrated and materialistic that in her best works it concentrates to the quality of a myth: it’s a superdense substance that glows inside itself. It pulls in and doesn’t let out… Those are still lives “Melancholy” and “Unstable Shadows”. ”The Middle of Summer or the Day of Saint Apostles Peter and Paul”…earthenware pots and a jug made of clay look as if excavated from the “Saint Bible’s hills”. This connection of times can seem to be a funny stretch if you don’t take into consideration that in the most successful Helen’s paintings each subject works as a reference to cultural reality, to the time layer depicted on the canvas of quite another time as objects of that material culture…
One should forget that consciousness of a modern artist is greatly “culturelized”, that his perception of the world is already not as immediate as his predecessors’ was.
Our type of perception is “the world through the culture” and the personality should be of great energy to become a creator and not a copyist! Helen Illichova has such energy and nothing in her paintings seems to be borrowed.
In Helen’s manner of painting there are many methods taken from cinema makers. She also “models” her own world – so recognizable and though strange and unknown. There could be a “reproduction” as if made by a school student, but here we are a “work of real art”: reality changed magically by a view of the creator…
 While looking at the stylized portraits, painted by Helen Illichova, we can’t help remembering anyone or anything,- from Rembrandt to Haals; all this is the echo, but at the same time it’s a hard reliable cultural lay, which you can rely on without realizing. As if you lean on the ground with your feet.
In presentation of “animate Nature” Helen’s grip is man-like, but lyricism is pure woman’s.
Helen is a person of deep seriousness. She can foresee the Mystery in the routine of the Earth.
Helen’s motion is inside: inside the sky; inside the flower-cup…
Helen Illichova has come to the most responsible step of “torments and joy, when “HOW?” comes out from the primary gained “WHAT?”
                                  
                                                   Tina Arsenieva