One general observation that can be glimpsed from this wealth of information is that it's hard to live with talent. It chooses to make itself known in the most unexpected ways. A painter, for example, might see many more colors than a regular person - and this increased workload pushes the painter's brain to work at higher capacity. To see the elasticity of movement is to understand the soul laid bare; to glimpse one's true intentions; to touch another's mystery. But is that a good thing? Who knows?

It takes courage to depict things once seen. And courage is usually forged during situations that create conditions for creative expression. And that's exactly what happened to Galina Tsynman as she lay virtually incapacitated by a severe injury.

She'd always loved to draw, for as long as she could remember. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she'd never given her sketches a second thought. Her job provided her with plenty of pencils and ink dipping pens; and she'd doodled playfully, creating what one would call comics: about her co-workers; about daily life. Made up or based on memories, she would record the images in her head without bothering to think how she had done it.

She could whip up a cute birthday card drawing in no time at all. It was fun and easy. She never gave a second thought to the fact that so many people spent years learning, often without success, what came so naturally to her.
Had she decided at some point in her life to take up art professionally, Galina would have likely built a pretty solid reputation. But it never even occurred to her.

But now, she faced a tragedy: her body had betrayed her, with nothing but her arms and fevered, troubled mind remaining in her control. As terrible as it may sound, this is just the kind of push that can trigger a wave of creativity and force one to take inventory of one's gifts and destiny.

Galina's ink and pencil drawing on small sheets of paper are expressions of surrealism in the purest sense - the way André Breton defined it in his Manifesto. She managed to construct snatches of dreams and vistas of her subconscious into a cohesive picture, and capture it on paper without conceptually domesticating it to make the image more accessible. The resolve to leave the sketches as they are, embrace their strangeness, speaks to a kind of parallel inner life that unfolds in the subconscious - a life full of symbolic imagery, with its own specific plot and cast of characters. Many people are astonished to discover something of this kind within them - but only a true artist has the guts to put this vision before an audience.

These works lay the artist's inner world bare before the eyes of strangers. It can be frightening - but it shows us how deep run the waters of human subconscious, and how differently we see the world. And the more honest an artist can be in this process, the more respect he or she deserves.

The phantasmagoric world of visions seems to have completely taken over Galina's art of this period. Her sketches created during this time flow into each other; their lines and subjects intertwine. The curve of one figurative detail would sometimes give life to a whole new story. Carried away by the subject, the drawing's dramatic finale would, in turn, often end in an intricate face, like an exclamation point at the end of an exciting story.

The graphic skill comes very easy to Galina. She seems to absorb techniques from the air around her: more evidence of her natural talent, which stems from her personality. Even the mechanical act of drawing brings her pleasure. But don't try to tell her about the technical competence of her works.

Because talent isn't a professional skill: it's an entity in and of itself. How long this entity is destined to exist, we cannot know; for most of those who have it, it lasts them all their lives. That is why creative people have a tradition of testing its durability and treating its source callously. Generous talent makes generous people who don't tremble in fear over every job they might lose.
Galina gives her sketches away without batting an eye. And people take them. People scrutinize them. They are not bound by time: they are projections of consciousness as it once assessed the situation. Each work is, as they say, one of a kind; just like a play that can never be performed in quite the same way twice.

Through her works, Galina tries, perhaps unconsciously, to solve complex problems of interaction between time and space by distorting figurative imagery. Her drawings indicate that these parameters are threaded onto a flexible vector that seamlessly connects all her works into a single stream. But she doesn't worry about theory. She follows the call of her natural talent, which elevates the realities of our life and cultivates goodness.

Svetlana Vais
NYC-press
InterArt Gallery