Family Heritage

Artist Statement: VIESTARTS AISTARS

Born in the summer of 1927 in Dobele, Latvia, Viestarts Aistars was the eldest of four sons in a family with a legacy of love for the arts. He immigrated to the United States in the aftermath of World War II, when Latvia was occupied by the Soviet army and the Aistars family was listed for deportation to concentration camps in Siberia, where many Latvians died. Chicago was Aistars’ first home in the United States, and he enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied art while learning to speak English. His education was interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army, but he returned to the Art Institute after the war and finished his degree, married Velta (Dunkelis), had two daughter--Daina and Zinta. Aistars moved to Kalamazoo in 1959 to become a part of a large and vibrant Latvian community.

Much of Aistars’ work reflects the home he lost, with frequent themes of Latvian culture and folklore, seascapes recalling the Baltic Sea, or the forests he wandered in his childhood. Perhaps it is not such a coincidence that many of these scenes have a resemblance to the landscape of Michigan. His favored mediums are oils, watercolors, and charcoal pencil.

Viestarts Aistars has had his artwork exhibited at the Detroit Art Museum, Indiana Art Center in Indianapolis and South Bend, Indiana, The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Grand Rapids Art Museum, as well as Latvian art exhibits in Seattle, Washington, New York City, Reading, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio, to name only a few. Aistars is a frequent participator in Kalamazoo Art Hops. He has had more than 60 one-man art exhibits in the Midwest and Eastern United States, including Boston, New York City, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Chicago, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Saginaw, Grand Rapids, and many other cities nationwide. Aistars has won numerous prizes and his work has been purchased by countless private collectors, also by the State Museum in Riga, Latvia, and the Art Museum in Jelgava, Latvia. A painting of a Latvian woman in folk costume hangs today in the Riga Pils (Riga Castle), the president's residence in Riga, Latvia.

To see more of Aistars’ work and read his story or to see a schedule of his exhibits, visit www.myspace.com/latvianartist or www.facebook.com/viestarts.aistars

LATVIAN

Dzimis Dobele 1927.gada vasara, Viestarts Aistars ir vecakais no cetriem deliem. Aistars imigreja uz ASV pec otra pasaules kara, kad Latviju parnema krievu armija. Vina pirmas majas Amerika bija lielpilseta Cikaga, kur Aistars studeja makslu Cikagas Makslas Instituta (Art Institute of Chicago). Te vins ari dibinaja gimeni—sieve, Velta, divas meitas. Aistars parcelas uz Kalamazu, Micigana, kur saistijas ar aktivu latviesu sabiedribu.

Aistars mil temas maksla, kas atgadina zaudetas majas—Baltijas jurmala, dzimtenes mezi, latviesu folklora. Reizem sie skati ari atgadina vina majas seit, Micigana. Iemilota technika: ellas, akvareli, zimejumi.

Viestartam Aistaram bijusas vairak ka 50 izstades. Izstadijies Detroitas makslas muzeja, Indianapole, Grand Rapidos, Sietla, Nujorka, Klivlande, Bostona, Mineapole, Milvokos, un citur. Sanemis vairakas godalgas, un vina darbi atrodas neskaitamas privatas kolekcijas, ka ari Rigas valsts muzeja un Jelgavas muzeja. Vina glezna—sieviete latviesu tautas terpa—atrodas Rigas Pili, Latvija.

Aistara darbus un dzives stastu var skatit: http://myspace.com/latvianartist

Tribute to Viestarts Aistars, my father,

on his 80^th birthday: July 15, 2007

Seeing Every Word My Father Painted

by Zinta Aistars

It doesn’t matter that we don’t speak. He paints, and with that, watching him, I hear every word. Not only the words, but the beating of his heart. I hear the whispers of a random breeze, tangling in his trees. I hear the shushing of waves, small ones, rippling against the soft, sandy shore, and the smash of the great ones, tipped with foam, breaking against the rocks. I hear the creak of old wood in his fishing boats, rusty hinges and masts that bend in the ocean gales, but never break. I hear the soft splatter of rain on his city pavement, on the curved and dripping sides of his umbrellas, blooming against the wet sky. I hear the silence, lying back in his lush gardens and endless meadows, watching his clouds bob high overhead.

I can hear him still, even if my understanding of his words, painted in vivid color on canvas, has grown more sophisticated with time – I’ve grown to understand something about the ups and downs of life by now, too, requiring a more deeply intoned language – and even when I have stepped away from my father’s paintings, they follow me. They have followed me since my earliest childhood, through all my growing years, and now ease me across the threshold of midlife. I know, they will follow me to the very end of my path.

For me, the hearing translates into written words on a page. For my father, his writing tool was a paintbrush. At first glance, perhaps two very different mediums of artistic expression. But are they so very different? My very earliest impressions of my father at work in his basement studio, when I was a little girl in braids, peeking around the corner and careful to not make a sound so as not to disturb the magic, was of a creator at work over his many worlds. It was that process of creation—from nothing to create something, from the white and blank canvas to draw out living flesh and living things, seascapes and landscapes and figures—that so fascinated me and sold me on art. I wanted that. I wanted to create, too. Surely there was nothing more satisfying in chosen occupation! If the fathers of other little girls I knew donned business suits and knotted ties around their necks and went off to offices with briefcases in hand, surely what my father did beat all. There was nothing magical about business, I thought. Calculating numbers and filling out spreadsheets and sitting in meeting after meeting after meeting… but see, my dad! My dad worked in solitude, separated from the busyness of the world outside, hidden as all wizards are in their towers and hidden caves, and he waved his wand, his brush, across the easel, and before long, behold: a forest sprang to life. A shaft of light fell on the moss. Flowers opened fresh faces to the sun. And up from the earth sprang streams of clear water…. The fathers of my little friends could do nothing to compare to this.

So I watched, and I learned from my father’s medium – paint – how to manipulate language. Art is creation, and I was giddy with what I had learned in seeing him paint. There was the blank white page. A fearsome thing. Silent and ungiving and patient as death. The creator could sweat and moan and writhe in the agony of uninspired creating, but the blank page, as the blank canvas, would have no mercy, give no clue, only wait, and wait, and wait. But then there was the moment, the first word as the first dab of color, that scarred the page and canvas, and it would never again be the same. Not even when erased or deleted. Juices flowed, passion turned its engines, wheels began to turn, pulleys loosen, and the machinery of creation was begun. No turning back now. Using words as my tool, I soon learned my father’s exhilaration. This was the elixir of the artist’s intoxication, the muse, the siren, and there would be no turning back.

Few compliments I have received over my writing career compare to that, when my readers, or my audience at an authors’ reading tell me: “I can see what you wrote. It is as if,” they might say, “you paint with words…” And I beam. The little girl in braids peeking around her father’s studio door remembers, and she feels the pride of achievement of a lesson well learned.

Here is what I learned from my father, the painter: when faced with a white canvas, the blank page, think about the composition. There must be balance. To what point do you wish to draw the eye? Consider where the eye goes first, then, to what place on the canvas does it go next? And then? Keep that inner eye intrigued, don’t let it slip off the page, but moving, moving, across all the lines and angles, taking it all in, every last detail, hungering for more, craving resolution, until at last—the picture is complete. When it is, then be sure the image haunts, and it remains long after the eyes of your audience have moved on to another spectrum. You must capture the mind, the spirit, the heart. To do this, the colors must blend with ease, but then, just when you think you’ve got it figured out, plotlines and paint lines in order, suddenly—a surprise! That slant of light against the dark background, oh, it fascinates, does it not? For a moment, you can’t help considering what it might be like to be standing inside that circle of light. To be a part of that painting. A part of that story. A main character. When the viewer and the reader sense that what they see resonates deep within, a kind of mirroring of their own experience and life sense, blending so seamlessly that they do not know where the story and the painting begin, and where their own life continues on, then you know you have made a crucial connection. Your art has touched another heart. For a moment in time, you, the artist, the viewer, the reader, are no longer alone.

Years passing, little girl unbraiding her hair to grow into the woman, and young father growing into an elderly man of accumulated wisdom and vision, more lessons transpire. There is the lesson of passion, yes, the near losing of oneself in one’s art: so immersed does the artist become, falling as if into a trance, a kind of madness, delusion and illusion made real, letting go of the boundaries and limitations of reality so as to dance on the other side, yet always come back again. It is necessary. Nothing less will sustain. But there is also the lesson of persistence: the long work day concluded, the artist comes home to begin the work day all over again, this time in his studio or her study. Because even my father had to go at some point to the office. Working as a commercial artist, long before the days of computer and clip art, he drew the cows that mooed across paper milk cartons, the coupons housewives clipped in Sunday newspapers, the menus the hungry read at the downtown posh restaurant. Draining work, perhaps, making the living room couch seem that much more inviting after 5 p.m. Yet my father returned home, not one day missed, and kissed his wife soundly hello, patted both daughters on the head, and bypassed the couch for his basement studio. It was not a drain to him. It was reinvigoration. The magical hours that made the other eight-hour nonsense make sense.

I got it. When the rejection slips came in for my first awkward poems and clumsy little stories, I didn’t worry. The sting was short-lived. One had to create first in response to the voice inside. The whispers of wisdom, that divine something connected, it seemed, straight up to God. Because there never really will be an explanation for art, will there? From where it comes and how it transforms and what it becomes.

My father once told me he was sorry. Yes, he dared. When I was a grown woman, he once apologized for not spending enough of those evening hours at home with me. Or his other daughter. We played overhead (or so he thought) with our toys and other distractions while he painted below, and sometimes did not come back upstairs until long after dark. I widened my eyes in wonder. Sorry? Was I missing something? I, who grew up in these swirls of color perfumed with the tang of turpentine? I missed nothing.

Not even the lesson that an artist must sometimes emerge from his den or studio to reenter the real world. When there was the vigor of youth and health, my father often packed up his palette and paints and folded up his wooden easel to announce: field trip! My mother packed a picnic lunch of dark Latvian bread, thick and fragrant with earthy grains, spread with real butter and lavish slices of sausage or ham, cheese, and pickles. Blankets were folded into the car trunk, but I don’t recall being able to sit on one. The places he took us were too rich with life. These were the worlds that lived in my father’s mind, I knew, because I saw him pull them from his memory and onto the canvas. Now and then, however, we had to step out into the real world and soak it all in. See the sights, smell the smells, hear the sounds, taste the tastes, feel the touch of reality on our skin so that we would have something to bring home again. So did the writer require living the life before she could construct the story. It was a gathering time. A knocking about time, sustaining and surviving all its hard knocks, submitting to the bruising of life at its keenest edge, because the art created in the tucked away place later would always reflect it. Not living fully, completely, utterly, and above all courageously, would also be evident. Life had its risks, chances would have to be taken, or the connection between artist and art, viewer and reader, might never be made. To paint the breeze in the branches of the tree, my father had to now and then go out into the field and feel it on his own skin. The paint the shining ripple on the water, my father had to roll up his pant legs and wade in. I, too, had to live my life before it could transcribe it. The rejection slips no longer came so frequently. Submission accepted. I got it.

I got it, Dad. How the paint flows in your bloodstream. Now the words flow in mine. As your basement studio, now my secluded den. I tap away at the keyboard as you dab away at the canvas. From the white page emerges something living that did not live before, and you planted that seed, that love of the art, that drive to create. I swirl a slant of light into my poem and I think of your forests and the sun breaking through. I paint with words because you taught me to see.