What’s it like to grow up in a forgotten city in Russia, to be a migrant worker, or having to demonstrate for fair elections? The artist Victoria Lomasko, who studied book design and graphic arts in Moscow, documents daily life in Russia in her drawings. She travels to ghost towns and villages, to the outskirts of cities and captures her impressions with a spontaneous, powerful stroke. Victoria calls her works graphic reportages. For example, she draws people at political rallies, at hearings in court, teachers that sometimes can only teach one pupil, or also children in penal camps for youth, who don’t have contact with the outside world.
For the exhibition … of bread, wine, cars, security and peace, she made a gigantic wall mural in Kunsthalle Wien titled Under Water.
You can see two worlds in her wall mural: up above, the insinuated scenery of a metropolis; down below, a lively, mysterious world under water. Here, fish swim together with protesting people, who are holding up a poster of a person behind bars. Some pale figures and objects, like champagne glasses, have fallen from the world above down into the water – one might think that perhaps a fish yanked on the table cloth covering a big table and toppled them down under water.
With her mixture of graphic reportage and fantasy, Victoria creates an intimate, magical atmosphere and invites us to dive into her underwater world in the heart of Russia.
What does your underwater world look like? Who swims along with you in the waves? What cause would you support and go demonstrating for? And how might your city or landscape above the water look like?
In this videos you will learn about the one-time printing technique, also called monotype, and discover how to make a two-world printed image.
You are going to need:
• sheets of paper
• aluminum foil
• brushes and paint, for example water-based tempera colors or, even better, lino-print colors (the colors should not dry too fast)
• cotton buds
• masking tape
Let’s begin:
Take a piece of aluminum foil, approximately the same size of your piece of paper, and place it on the table. You can also tape the foil down so it doesn’t slide around.
Choose a color for the underwater world and paint a thick layer onto the lower half of the foil, in whatever form you like, using a broad brush.
Now take a cotton bud and quickly draw the figures in your underwater world on the foil – you have to be fast because the applied color must not dry. Use as many cotton buds as you need in order to “draw away” the color, so that clear silver lines remain. You can also clean them every now and then with a piece of kitchen roll or a painting rag.
Now place the lower half of your piece of paper on your drawing, and stroke firmly with your hand over the paper. Afterwards, carefully remove the paper.
You can design the upper part of your picture in exactly the same way: choose a different color, and paint a different shape onto the upper section of the aluminum foil. Naturally, you can also use a new piece of foil when there isn’t enough place remaining.
Quickly draw your “upper world” onto the foil with a cotton buds. If you make a mistake in your drawing, simply paint over this place and try again.
And if you want to write a text in your drawing, don’t forget to make the mirror image of the text. Challenging!
Place your piece of paper on the foil so that the water line matches up with the underwater world, and stroke firmly with your hand. Pull it off – and there it is: your two-world image!
Your artwork is a one-time print. But you can always put more paint onto your patches of color and make even more artworks.
Please send a photo of your World under Water! to vermittlung@kunsthallewien.at
… or post it on Instagram #spaceforkids #WeltunterWasser #kunsthallewien #ofbread
… or post it in our Facebook group /KunsthalleWienKinderworkshop