Childhood Remembrance

# 28

Oil paint on fibreboard, 13×17 inches. Handmade oil painting.

Масло, оргалит, 32 * 42 см

Childhood Remembrance

Childhood Remembrance is a real event from my past. I was walking home from the playground and a photographer stopped me. He asked to walk with this broken bike to photograph him. The photographic work then took part in a city exhibition dedicated to children. He sent me a copy of it. With which I recently painted this oil painting.
Childhood memory is a blanket sewn from scraps of memories. And the more good memories it has, the warmer and more comfortable it covers us all our lives. But we can never predict what exactly will remain in the memory of our children with enthusiastic joy. The best childhood memory can be born at any moment, regardless of our efforts and desires. Handmade oil painting. Games with sun bunnies. The discovery of sunbeams in itself delighted us! It seemed like a miracle, and when I learned to manage this miracle myself, there was twice as much joy. Especially if your beloved kitten could share this joy with you.

See other paintings by Evgenia Zragevskaya here: Portrait of a stranger

Homemade burnt sugar lollipops. Someone cooked burnt sugar in a spoon, someone right in my mother’s favorite frying pan. The biggest lucky ones were those with a lollipop mold. And so they went out into the yard with their domestic cockerels and squirrels, and we envied them in unison.
Huts from all over the world. How we loved to huddle in all kinds of houses! Whoever could from what, from that and built them: from branches, from planks, from blankets thrown over stretched ropes. The girls arranged real life and comfort inside, and the boys … well, the boys went on a visit from house to house, or they had their own den.
Swimming in the river. How much joy the river brought us! You come on bicycles, swim, jump from the bungee and it’s already evening, it’s time to go to help your parents with a vegetable garden and cattle.
Milky Way. Not everyone was lucky to see the Milky Way in all its glory. It was necessary to be on the street late in the evening, practically at night. This usually happened in August, when they went on a hike with their parents, stayed on a fishing trip with an overnight stay, or later returned from somewhere. A fascinating and memorable sight for a lifetime.
Homemade shows and concerts. A performance or a concert is a solid, collective affair. You cannot cope alone, and it is not interesting — the theater of one actor. They gathered in companies, assigned roles, took different things from their parents to build costumes, looked for a place, drew posters and waited for the audience. Without the help and support of adults, such performances would not have been successful either. Thanks to them at least for agreeing to come as spectators and not dispering our rehearsals with brooms (although there were such grannies as well).
The wrappers. Everyone was collecting something. The boys usually collected stamps, stickers, gum inserts, bottle caps, and the girls collected candy wrappers. It was a whole movement — fantasy exchange. Who has a larger collection, who has a rare candy wrapper, who have foreign ones. A naive but fascinating affair.
Preparing for the New Year. For some reason now there is no feeling of the New Year. And it’s not that we’re adults. In our childhood, adults also felt that a holiday was coming to us. It all started a month before him: they drew posters for the class, for school, for mom and dad to work, bought and signed postcards to distant relatives, glued homemade garlands of colored or just dyed paper (if there was no colored paper), made costumes from whatever they could, rehearsed scenes, looked for or made interesting toys for the Christmas tree themselves. And decorating the tree was an event in itself! And the whole village or town was waiting for the main day, it was felt by the breath of the shop windows and the flickering of the lanterns. People were becoming more smiling …