Church in Kiev

click image to enlarge

When I was a junior in college I was looking for apartments at the beginning of a semester, at Syracuse University. In one apartment a desk had been left behind and in the drawer of the desk there was an 8 x 10 black and white photograph of the church in this drawing. There was nothing else in the desk and no markings on the photo other than the name “Kiev”, written on the back. It was obviously an old world War 2 photograph of a bombed out church, probably taken by a soldier.

I didn’t rent the apartment but I kept the photograph and as I was taking a class in etching that semester I did an etching of the image of the church. This was a big event for me because up until that point I considered myself an abstract artist and I did not consider representational subject matter something I should or could do, but I was very moved by the image and wanted to do it as an exception.

Studying the image and drawing it, pulling the prints, I had my first insight into the enormous power of light and shade on three dimensional form. When I finished the etching I printed the class requirement of three prints and taped them up to the drying wall to dry.

The next morning when I returned to cut the dry prints down there was a note attached to one of them requesting a price, someone wanted to buy a print. As there was no name or phone number I wrote a price on the note, I don’t remember how much. The next day there was money in an envelope and one of the prints was gone. From childhood on I sold many paintings and drawings to friends and relatives, but that was my first sale of a work of art to a stranger.

I have often looked through books of collected images of Russian Churches and I have never seen anything like this one. Especially odd is the onion dome on top of a hemisphere and the whole thing only one story high.