By Alaina Rook: DU student, intern, chai tea enthusiast
Ania Gola-Kumor was
insistent that a phone interview would not be enough to truly
understand her work--“I just don't think
people can see me without my painting around me”--so rather, we
skyped. Immigrating some thirty years ago from Eastern Europe, where
she was classically trained in the arts since childhood, Ania uses
her paintings to express herself when words aren't enough. And while
there was no need for her to be self-conscious about her
grammatically perfect, albeit musically accented English, I did bless
the technological innovators for providing me with a means of
actually seeing into Kumor's colorful world.
When considering what I could possibly
write about for this blog, I headed to the quiet gallery basement in
search of some inspiration amongst the canvases stored below.
Flipping through canvas after canvas of dreamy colors and idyllic
scenes, I came to an abrupt halt as I came across one of Kumor's
magnificently massive canvasses, immediately entranced by the
intensity and power of each intentional stroke. Kumor is humble and
reluctant about these paintings that so enamored me, feeling somehow
that they are unfinished even in their completeness—desiring to
pour even more of her heart and vision onto the canvas in layers and
layers of color and feeling that make her paintings so raw and juicy.
But in Kumor's adept hands, a painting
might never be finished. “I have to paint. If I don't have a
painting to paint, I repaint over finished canvases”. She explains
her compulsion to paint as a need to express her emotions, without
which she would go crazy. In America where she originally came as a
political refuge, where speaking English (her third language) is the
norm, it is easy to see how words could not be enough. Truly and
openly communicating one's emotions in a way that in honest is nearly
impossible in any language--language is fallible to express that
which is most essential to our souls.
Her paintings are an attempt to capture
the feeling of a moment. They are abstract aerial landscapes--not so
much that they are one refracted image of a physical place, rather,
that they are the collective memory of the color and emotion of being
in that space. Since coming to Colorado, her artistic palette has
evolved to fit the landscapes she sees here telling a new story—the
reds of the rock, the yellows of the sky, the black of the shadows
where the two former meet.
The other aspect Kumor attributes to
her evolution as an artist in the past twenty years has been her
children. Literally, the persistent demands of raising children
forced her to reevaluate how she was able to create art. “I didn't
have time to wait until I had the courage—I just had to do it.
Bolder, faster, more spontaneous.” Her paintings speak with strokes
of power, colors of emotion, a voice that calls strongly out for all
to come and listen to what it has to share. Her artistic vision is
no longer soft-spoken or shy, it is a declaration of her world and
how she chooses to exist within it.
