I am not a European painter. I am not an American painter.
1
Bulgaria 1974-1990
Born 1974 in Sofia, Bulgaria
The story is that my mom returned from Kiev to Sofia to give birth to me, not realizing that I would not be allowed to cross the border once I left her belly. So the plan was to leave me in an orphanage, which almost happened but didn’t thanks to an infectious disease that caused the facility to be shut down for some time. My mother left me in Sofia only a few weeks after my birth and returned to medical school in Kiev. The return was short-lived and somehow, my mom, turned hysterical, driven by madness by the separation, with breasts engorged with milk, managed to travel across multiple borders with no authorization and return to me. She tells me that I never slept or ate. I mostly laid in my stroller under a tree with my giant black eyes wide-open staring at the dappled light of the canopy. It’s still my favorite activity besides looking for four leaf clovers.
Another story, less bureaucratic and in fact brutal, is that my sudden appearance caused my grandmother to take her own mother to an old person home where she perished very quickly. It was a one-bedroom apartment that we all shared and there was no room for me. That was my great-grandmother Anna who I displaced. I “caused” her death. She was a shaman, a midwife and had a small flower shop. I feel deeply connected to her. They all said that she had intense blue eyes, very rare amongst my people. She was Macedonian and walked over the mountains with my great-uncle strapped to her back fleeing ethnic persecution and looking for her husband who was a deserter from the Serbian army. He refused to shoot his gun against Bulgarians, was imprisoned, beaten, and tortured, which caused his premature death. The immigrant story of “leaving with nowhere to go” was repeated by my mother when she decided that we had to leave Bulgaria in 1989 no matter what.
My mom was young, 21 years old when I was born. She shaved my head (French idea about how to ensure thick hair), read to me Dostoyevsky, took me to the puppet theater weekly and told me endless stories about my missing father (he remained to finish his aviation engineering degree in Kiev). Her father was a building engineer working on the massive dams that were built during the 50’s. I often went to the “obekt”, the construction sites to see him and I link my obsession with concrete and rebar to these visits. The story my mom often tells that I love most is about her childhood in the Rodopi mountains: the thick snow, the wolves, and her dog Djana, a karakachan sheep dog that ended up getting shot by the local policeman. When I was 7 years old I had my own sheep dog also named Djana. She was killed in front of me by a passing truck. We lived in the city. Winters were endless, dark, and cold. The world seemed to be encrusted with black ice sprinkled with fresh black suds. I was enrolled in a sports school for rhythmic gymnastics starting at age six where I trained 7 days a week and learned how to endure intense physical strain, brutal discipline and emotional abuse.
My father started traveling quite a bit in the late 70’s as a flight engineer with Balkan Airlines. He went to Vietnam, Africa, Cambodia, Afghanistan, China and Nicaragua. I loved his black suitcase which brought various treasures: African masks, sandalwood statues, bronze statues of Cambodian dancers with their hands bent impossibly backwards, Ethiopian papyrus paintings, the occasional coconut and the odd magazine issue discarded by some Western airlines filled with colorful pictures of stuff. My brother and I cut out pictures of legos, Munchichis and colorful photos of animals, which we used for our endless handmade games and toys. My brother and I were always making stuff especially while sick with bronchitis for months and stuck at home. Our favorite was making Survachki. I still remember the bending of the willow branches and the arrangement in piles of our much-coveted materials: string, cotton balls, buttons, seeds, beans, and dried fruit. One year I ingeniously smashed a bunch of New Year’s Eve (the non-Christmas) ornaments to make glitter. We never had a proper “New Years Eve '' pine tree but instead decorated the giant rubber plant that lived in our living room on the 5th floor of a concrete communist style building. We had no heat and my job was to wipe the mold that grew on the wet concrete walls (the north facing ones) with bleach. I loved bleach and used it to paint intricate drawings on whatever black fabric I could find. The bleach created a similar line to the lines used by Siberian Eskimos who etched the large walrus tusk (my father bought it in Kiev in 1973 with his entire monthly stipend and ended up starving for weeks) with reddish colored engraving telling stories of the hunt wrapping around its smooth and delicate surface. I loved that tusk and caressed and looked at it daily. It was very heavy but I loved holding its cold, smooth body in my lap. I sensed wildness.
My father took and developed all of our photos. He also made Super-8, black and white films that we projected and watched repeatedly. I remember vividly the camera sliding across the facades of the temple walls of Angkor Wat revealing the mysterious faces and limbs of deities, which he filmed in 1981. I loved how the film smelled and how at the end of each roll it would flip and sputter. I knew about the Khmer Rouge and the atrocities they had committed because my parents witnessed first hand the evidence of the killing fields and talked about it. I overheard the details as they talked to their friends sitting around the kitchen table with a few glasses of rakia and a small bowl of “mezze”
(pickled vegetables).
I also knew about Vietnam and Nicaragua because my father flew airplanes that transported the wounded. I overheard him describing what he witnessed.
The mountain:
I worshiped Vitosha, the giant blue mountain that towered over Sofia. I painted her. I looked at her. I embraced her. I longed for her. My grandfather built by hand a small stone house in the foothills where we spent most days during the summer. There was a big walnut tree which was my actual dwelling. I hung upside-down from its branches daydreaming for hours. I often ate, read and took naps wrapped around its branches high in the canopy despite my grandmother’s endless protestations. “Upside-down” is a practice and so is “wandering”. That’s what I did and still do. I walked around alone through the fields, dirt roads and woods looking for Baba-Yaga’s house.
Everything changed when I was 11 and my youngest brother was born. There was always something that needed to be done and I grew up fast.
It was 1985 and I went to Zimbabwe with my dad that same year. The vastness of the world was intoxicating. Nobody traveled back then. It was the condition of being behind the iron curtain. I was allowed to go because my mother and my newborn brother stayed behind in Sofia as a guarantee that we would not defect to the West. I felt the crushing weight and pain of the “adult world” for the first time. Even under Mugabe Zimbabwe bore all the scars of colonialism and racism. I was a kid but sensed the horrors for which I had no names yet. I got deeply and irreconcilably heart-broken. I bought a small wooden carving of a hippo. I kept it in my bed until the day, December 25th, 1990 we left everything and everyone in Bulgaria. I left my mountain forever.
The mountain often felt like a prohibition, a guardian of something beyond. The beyond or “nowhere” is where I have been since.
2
Baltimore 1990-97
Baltimore School for the Arts, 91-93
Goucher College, 93-97 BA in Philosophy
My family left on December 25th, 1990 leaving the dishes still on the table from the family gathering the night before. My dad gave the keys to our apartment to one friend and the keys to our car to another.
A long journey of half believable encounters, circumstances, and misunderstandings brought us to the basement apartment of an old row house in West Baltimore. I remember getting off the bus one day and hearing an uncanny sound. I knew deep down came from the core of my mother. As I turned the corner I saw her in the midst of the small backyard holding a hose in one hand and standing frozen like a statue as fountains of rats exploded all around her. The scream was hers and so was the unfolding remarkable event. She had tried to drown out the rats by sticking the hose in their burrows.
This happened a year after our arrival, a year marked by unbearable loneliness. My parents worked at a chocolate factory while my brothers and I watched the Gulf War on a black and white broken TV, roamed the desolate streets and tried to avoid the curious glances of the neighbors. I took care of kids and animals to earn some money and cooked, cleaned and cared for my siblings.
Things had gotten more bearable by the time of the “rat fountains”, my brothers went to school, my parents had applied for political asylum and had work permits, and I was accepted at the Baltimore School for the Arts. My English was minimal and I didn't understand anything my peers said to me as they looked at me and laughed. It took me endless efforts to read my first book “Catch 22” as I wrote English vocabulary words on cash-register tape. I kept multiple rolls of it in an old Fanny pack I wore at all times, which added to my “weirdness”. My “reality” was emotionally confusing, crushingly difficult, and frightening. I witnessed daily how my parents were being “undone” physically and mentally by the humiliation and burden of immigration. Their sacrifice was in my name.
My neighborhood was full of half burned buildings, piles of garbage, junkies and characters. I drew and photographed everything and wrote letters to my grandmother describing the details and my sorrow. “Tuga” means both sorrow and longing in Bulgarian. My letters were “love letters”. I also wrote letters to my best friend from art school Annie. She still has them along with a set of small earrings I sent her. I saw Annie for the first time in 2014 in Berlin where she traveled from Sofia to meet me.
My first real job in high school was as a waitress at a small cafe run by two Palestinian women, mother and daughter. I continued to work there even after I moved to Philadelphia in 1997. I knew everyone. I witnessed my customers get older, lose parents, and have children. I heard their stories about fleeing Jordan, Siria, and Egypt and learned how to listen and observe. I also worked at the maximum security prison teaching a weekly creative writing class to about hundred male prisoners, editing their letters home, their collections of short stories and thousands of pages of biographies. I was reading everything written by Michel Foucault.
At Goucher college I studied philosophy and wrote my thesis on “Wonder”.
3
Philadelphia 1997-2002
Tyler School of Art, 1999-2000, MFA in Painting
In 1997 I spent a year painting to prepare a portfolio, while working as an interior design assistant and smoking pot with my best friend Peter Ryan, a 7ft tall photographer with Marfan Syndrome whose heart ticked like an artificial clock. I made a giant painting of a bird and was obsessed with the word “callow”, attended a graduate seminar on Duchamp and took a painting class at Tyler with Frank Bramblett. Frank asked me to make an all black painting using oil and adding various materials to change the texture of the paint. It was a revelation about space, light and matter. My main advisor was Stanley Whitney, whose words still hang out in my studio like tree branches in a thick forest. Dona Nelson commanded the entire group of painting grads to make 250 drawings in a single weekend. I did it and it changed my practice and thinking forever. Dona has been my most important painter friend and interlocutor for more than 25 years.
I met Matt McGarvey in the fall of 1999 after my summer trip to Rome, part of a graduate program run by Temple University. In Rome, I met the poet Ross Gay, read Lacan and walked through the days and nights immersed in the architecture and sexuality of the city. My body still remembers the sensation of riding on the handlebars of a stranger’s bike at dusk through Parco Celio, the wind blowing between my thighs and the purple hues of the sky punctuating the dark gray webs of the tree canopies.
Matt is still my partner and we have shared our lives for more than two decades. A musician and thinker Matt is immersed in sound and language and I dwell in the visual. We complete each other.
I went to Bulgaria for the first time only a couple of weeks after we met. I was the first one from the family to return and was met by a huge crowd of my parents' friends at the airport. I spent the following weeks drinking coffee with the women and “rakia” with the men, both men and women seeing not me but my parents sitting across from them. They told me everything ….. the dead came to life, the past returned, the present vanished. It was bitterly cold and dark in Sofia that January. I met a Lebanese guy at a New Years Eve party and went on long walks with him in the frozen, empty streets. His presence gave me some relief from the confusion and sorrow that marked my return. I was a ghost, and the place of my childhood felt distorted and twisted, both familiar and unbearably foreign. He was from Beirut, a place I am intensely drawn to.
Night in Sofia became the realm of bands of homeless dogs that roamed the streets in search of food. Most of them were pure breeds: great danes, Collies, poodles, and shepherds abandoned during the “crisis”, as thousands of families became bankrupt or left Bulgaria leaving lonely grandparents and sick family members behind. People simply left their beloved dogs out on the street. I brought some chicken soup for a half-frozen poodle and his giant spotted companion huddled under a car outside of my grandmother’s apartment building. It was gone in seconds.
At the cemetery nestled in the foothills of Vitosha the homeless dogs are well fed. People visit their loved ones and bring all sorts of food which they place on the frozen ground. I went with her that winter and watched the gray figures stark against the white thick snow, their stiff verticality incongruous as the dogs watched and waited for them to leave.
When I was little my grandmother brought us there regularly in the summer and I loved squatting in the tall grass carefully removing the weeds to make room for the humble daisy-like “Nev-en” flowers ready to bloom in their yellow and orange glory.
On the bus I observed the men of all ages in their dark brown and gray coats with frayed edges and old shoes nervously clutching the hands of young children wearing colorful sneakers. Color was synonymous with the West when I was growing up. I envied the blond haired German children in their neon ski outfits or swimming trunks. What I really longed for was the ease with which they occupied space, the way they laughed, ate and ran. I was raised by my grandmother to be small, quiet, and invisible. She was an abyss of longing for adventure, sensuality, with a massive imagination fueled by her insatiable reading habits, but on the outside she was a shell. Tiho, tiho, ….. (quiet, quiet) she mumbled as she clutched my arm firmly, never letting go. I learned to obey and stand next to her in line (we were always standing in line for food, etc.) lost in my internal world.
The madness of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, …..
I recently made a painting called “Onoda”, a portrait of the Japanese soldier who lived in isolation and defended for 35 years a small island in the Philippines, thinking that the Second World War was still raging. The painting started as a blood red battle painting in 2003 when I still lived in New Orleans and after a decade of transformation and repainting I made “Onoda” while reading Hertzog’s astonishing book “The Twilight World”.
Friends and Animals:
My best friend in Bulgaria when I was 9 years old was a 35 year old man named Alex who had a black German shepherd named Lacki and lived in a house (very unusual for urbanized Sofia) surrounded by stacks of books and fish tanks. I didn’t care for kids my age and preferred to spend time with Alex and some other “dog” people who gathered every evening at the abandoned stadium to chat and let their dogs play. I sat around listening and watching.
When I was 13 I rescued a black pigeon who slept in my bed and flew around the apartament avoiding the attacks of our arthritic cat (another being I found dumped in the trash bin and nursed back to life). When I moved to Los Angeles in 2005 I found a pigeon in Elysian Park with clipped wings. I named him “Chicken” and taught him how to fly. I painted or did Tai-chi in the parking lot watched by the bewildered, nodding junkies as he sat on my shoulder. I recently made a painting called “All the Animals I Love”.
Peter died in 2002. I was working as a curatorial assistant at the Philadelphia Museum of Art absorbed in the archive of painter Warren Rohrer as I assisted Susan Rosenberg in curating a retrospective exhibition and putting together the accompanying catalog. I researched and wrote the chronology. I became intensely intimate with the details of his life and fell deeply in love with him and his paintings. I feel relieved thinking about the “full arc” of a painter’s life. I want that…..to paint my whole life and to “sweetly die”.
In the summer of 2001 I made the painting “Men Appeared at the Door” based on my experiences in civil disobedience during the anti-Bush protests in Washington DC. The painting hung on the wall adjacent to the TV that replayed the stunning images of 9/11 over and over, the blood red skyline of my painting and the piles of cartoony cops and pink skinned civilians strangely intertwined with those captured by cameras on the ground and in real time. Another painting completed earlier that summer had burning and smoking crashing airplanes crowding the background as a group of disfigured, tuber-like creatures fled the wreckage confronting the viewer, grotesque and helpless.
4
New Orleans: 2002-2005
My first show was the Louisiana Biennial in 2003 at the ICA in New Orleans, curated by Terry R. Myers, Odili Donald Odita and Valerie Cassel. I had five large paintings and Billy Weisman bought “Silhouettes and Sonars” for her collection in Los Angeles.
Herbie, an epileptic Irish poet and Tasha, a painter and poet who knew the Beat poets in SF, worked and lived in the studio below me. She spoke in tongues and Herbie drew with charcoal and mumbled stories about racing horses around Manhattan and the IRA. I was brutally ill and suffering from unrelenting, excruciating and unidentifiable in its origin pain in my right arm which grew in intensity and affected my entire right side. I slowly lost my ability to walk property, think or relate to other people. I knew that if we didn't leave I would die.
I often went to see my friend Cloe dance flamenco and marveled at the geometry and precision of her movements, the angles changing in response to every strum of the guitar. The guitarist, incredibly tall, slumped and in love with his guitar crouched in the dark corner of the cafe sipping on a lukewarm large whiskey. I felt relief watching him. Cloe was also strong and full of vitality while mine seemed to be slowly but surely disappearing.
Matt and I left New Orleans in May 2005 and I went to Skowehegan for the summer where I made seven paintings about floods. I made a painting called “Cut Elephant” based on a recurrent dream of water engulfing everything, fast moving and impersonal.
5
Los Angeles: 2005-present
My parents love to tell stories about my first trip to the Black Sea at age 1. My dad wanted to see if I could swim so he dropped me in the water and I promptly sank to the bottom. I stood for long periods of time resting on my hands looking at the sea between my chubby legs to the horror of concerned women who witnessed and worried about too much blood getting stuck in my head. I still do that anytime I am near the ocean.
During Covid I drove with my 12 year old son across town to Santa Monica to the beach to watch the sunset and swim. We left after dark and listened to Japanese trap music at shockingly high volume practicing “letting go”. I believed it saved both of us.
I started writing letters again and sent a few to Dona Nelson. After reading Jack Witten’s diaries I started my own daily sketchbook practice. I listened to recordings of Ross Gay reading his poetry and the images coupled with my daily thoughts producing intense synchronicities.
I made this large watercolor just a few weeks before I found out I was pregnant.
My son Neven was born in Los Angeles in 2008 and I made “The General'' that December. It was 2 am, maybe it was December or January, when I heard the thump of drums drifting into my studio. I followed the sound across the empty field and found myself amidst a Bear ceremony. The bonfire was massive and a group of 20 or so dancers circled it as another group pounded the drums. A stranger gestured towards me and invited me to join the circle. I sat shivering a bit and marveling at the incongruous site of this native celebration framed by the DTLA skyline …. all taking place on the floodplain of the LA River, most recently designated as a Supersite waiting for federal funds to get the toxic layers removed in order to build a park. “The General” is a portrait of LA, a ruin reclaiming its vertical ascent, the highway ramps curving like hula hoops tracing and retracing her figurative contours.
I have been working in the same studio for twenty years and have witnessed these most recent transformations of the land, always sensitive to the river and her imprisonment. I paint her often.
The pain came with me to LA and was my constant companion for another decade and a half. The “pain” defined my life and wrapped around me in every way. I couldn't drive, carry my child, stand, sit, or sleep for any extended period of time. Excruciating spasms left me unable to move for days. Painting both hurt me and helped me stay clear minded and disciplined as I tried everything to get better. I am finally free of the pain but fear its return. The pain feels ancient and ancestral, a burden, a curse, a “time collapse”. I have been just surviving for decades and now I want to actually live.
Kapka Kassabova’s book “To The Lake" illuminates so much about my own psychology and personal history. The parallels are uncanny and the revelations life- saving. I can see so much more clearly the connections, practices, and familial systems that preserve and perpetuate trauma. Macedonia was always part of my matrilineal line but obscured and twisted. In 2001 I went back to Bulgaria to have my tonsils removed (a brutal infection ravaged my body but I had no insurance and access to health services in America). The recovery was harsh but also sweet as I laid on the couch in my grandmother’s tiny apartment in Sofia. I was unable to speak for two weeks but I listened to her talk endlessly as I doodled in my sketchbook. She told me about the Macedonian family that died en masse during the earthquake in Skopje. About being imprisoned after 1944 because she refused to become an informant and about my grandfather’s exile to the mines for being an “enemy of the people '', a charge levied on anyone who was educated or came from a well-off family. I wrote questions in my sketchbook and pointed to them demanding a response but she ignored most of them. She just talked and repeated certain episodes but avoided discussing the context or how she felt. We also watched episodes of Dallas, the 80’s american soap opera and she wanted to know why Americans are obsessed with “asses”. I knew she was ashamed that she grew up in a shack on the edge of Sofia, part of a makeshift refugee camp and was never accepted by my grandfather’s family. Around 2006, I found out that my grandfather had another wife and child back in Germany. He never saw them after the Russian invasion of Bulgaria and the beginning of the Cold War, but looked for them for decades, establishing contact just before he died in 1997.
So many secrets. In that environment of fear, I grew up as a truly new type of urbanized, modern Soviet era subject. I studied Esperanto, participated in the Children’s assembly and believed in progress, internationalism and the communist promise. The Children’s Assembly was organized by Ludmila Zivkova, the eccentric daughter of the dictator and leader of the party Todor Zivkov. I loved meeting children from around the world and preparing the classroom for delegates to visit. In 1983 I was involved in an afterschool collage program led by my beloved teacher Katia Nicolova (I am still in touch with her). I directly cut into large sheets of colored paper creating animals, plants, and abstract forms I used to build marvelous worlds which decorated the walls of the classroom. During a visit Gorbachev’s wife loved one of my collages and asked to have it.
I still remember when in 1988 Todor Zivkov was led off the stage by armed men during a televised session of the party. My world slowly dimmed and disappeared.
The gasmasked, rabbit woman, a self-portrait …. she has been around for two decades, a canary in the mine. She watches and recoils but remains transfixed. The Kukeri are her double, stomping in reverie they become unfixed.
6
Mattole, Humboldt County, CA
With my family: Matt, Neven and our three dogs, we spent multiple consecutive summers camping for 2-3 weeks at a time at Mattole beach, a wild and windy BLM campground nestled between the edges of the Kings Range Mountains and the delta of the Mattole River. The place is accessible by a single lane dirt road that follows the river and starts at Petrolia, a tiny town with a single gas station and many secrets. We spent our days swimming in the estuary or the river, walking on the beach, and talking to random neighbors, often lonely single men “on a journey”. The serious hikers spent the night preparing their gear without looking up or speaking and set out at dawn on the trails going South. We preferred to drift north, observed by curious seals and ospreys. Neven wrote a poem about the sand hitting our shins like needles.
My most cherished habit was waking up right before sunrise, making black coffee and walking to the estuary to swim naked and alone. Chilled to my bone marrow but exhilarated I will go back to camp, drink more coffee and read Jane-Anne Philips’ books and draw in the car until the many creatures in the tent eventually stumbled out demanding breakfast.
One morning I found myself standing and looking at the point where the Mattole river entered the waves of the Pacific, a churning and monstrous entwinement. The rhythm of the freshwater mixing with that of the ocean, glitching, writhing and unstoppable mixing, errotic and impersonal. My vision locked, my life rhythms tuned to something wholly inhuman … and a thought passed through my consciousness leaving a mark that still burns, etching itself deeper. I longed in that moment to become dematerialized and subsumed by the glistening rhythm of the twisting bodies of water. They were also seemingly being turned into flecks of light unbound by tides, gravity or any other force. I also wondered if this is what Matt feels while making music.
Many years ago I dreamt that I was walking down a cobblestone road lined with buildings belonging to many different places and eras. Their facades served like screens down which flowed rivers of written words and letters of every language. I was walking, drawn by a mysterious sound to the edge of a sunflower field knowing that the origins of the sound lay beyond it, an organ at the center of the universe.
In my youth I thrived on my skills around “leaving”... The deserter started showing up in my drawings. The deserter leaves. He doesn't look away but is not stupefied by the witnessing. I often thought that Matt was that character, while I drew myself as a rather chubby girl with pig tales frozen (her back turned to the viewer) looking “witnessing the unwitnessable” transfixed and immovable.
epilogue
It’s 2024 and my son is 16. He is named after a flower, a medicinal plant beloved by healers in the Balkans and after my best friend from graduate school Dylan Collier who passed away very young. Dylan was from Memphis and his paintings of skylines and billboards hang all over my home in Echo Park. Dylan loved and emulated James Dean, introduced me to Ed Rusha’s work, Three Six Mafia and Will Oldam’s music. He really wanted to teach me how to drink. His Americanness was not pop however, but steeped in a Southern melancholy and darkness that I am drawn to and became subsumed by in New Orleans.
Link to something I wrote about Dylan but you have to scroll down a bit to get to it:
“Does the sun rise darkly there
As it rises darkly here?”
From a poem by Miladinov “Longing for the South”.
It does. Something about the Balkans and the American south overlaps and intertwines.
Beyond it is the desert of the South west. I return to the desert for healing. It’s the place that nourishes me. The silence and vastness are an elixir. The desert, like my painting proposes and offers an escape, the escape I have longed for my whole life. The escape from the pain.
Kassabova writes about the PAIN that overtook her and crippled her mother. “It was the only thing there was. Yes, something was rising like a dark wave, time after time, trying to make itself known beyond any doubt, a shape shifting presence that felt ancient. It had never been properly challenged …”, and had destroyed both her grandmother and her mother and she was next in line. “The mask lurked behind my own face”.
The escape is not possible. Only deeper understanding through direct encounter. The recent paintings are records of these encounters with narratives, gestures, faces, and habits. I am also reclaiming my connection to the plants, landscapes and sounds that are part of my lineage but became obscured and distorted first by the Communist brand of cultural revolution that sought to deny and prohibit the “old ways” and by immigration which required assimilation as corollary to survival. My recent paintings are of Kukeri, seascapes and snowscapes. I am slowly healing because I don't want to pass down neither the pain nor the fear to my son.
We are the stories we tell.
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