FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Hadas Gallery

541 Myrtle Ave

Brooklyn, NY 11205

Contact: Joshua H. Stulman, Curator/Gallery manager

C: 215-704-2205, E: info@hadasgallery.com

 Ruin: Rebirth by Leah Kohlenberg

Photography Exhibition Jan. 29 – Mar. 18, 2012

 Artist Reception: Feb. 16^th, 7 pm

 Hadas Gallery is proud to present the recent work of photographer Leah Kohlenberg.

“Ruin: Rebirth” is a series of 30 photographs that focus on the evolution and devolution of urban life. Kohlenberg has spent the past 5 years traveling the eastern block and Mediterranean region documenting communities left in the shadow of the soviet collapse and economic downfall.

Her photographs find beauty in the decay of urban structures and humor in its awkward attempts at repair. Kohlenberg’s use of floral imagery is an important sub-theme that serves as a poetic reminder of  “vanitas”, as well as a counterpoint to the manmade structures.

The inclusion of Grecian ruins helps relate the timeless lifecycle of a city. As Kohlenberg documents tourism to these ruins, she brings into question her own tourism of the fallen communist empire. The inclusion of single image taken in Brooklyn links our city to those halfway around the world and asks us if we are in a state of ruin or rebirth.

Leah Kohlenberg is a writer and painter, and a former correspondent for Time Magazine’s Asian edition in Hong Kong.

Hadas Gallery is located at 541 Myrtle Avenue in The Rohr Jewish Center near the campus of Pratt Institute (between Steuben and Emerson Sts., across from the Pratt Store). Regular gallery hours are Sunday 12-5pm, and Monday through Thursday 1pm-6pm or by appointment.

 C: 215·704·2205 | E: info@hadasgallery.com | W: www.hadasgallery.com

Hadas Gallery | 541 Myrtle Avenue | Brooklyn, NY 11205

C-Train Princess (with her parents) in Blue/Leah Kohlenberg/Acrylic and pastel on canvas/December 2011

NEW YORK CITY – “Excuse me, ma’am? You look like you are in need of poetry.”

The statement, issued to me sotto voce by an earnest, be-spectacled young man*, seemed out of the place in the cacophonous subway stop where I was waiting. But it was, in fact, what I needed.

“Sure,” I said, a little wearily. “What have you got?”

He smiled, stood up straight and said:

Quit and quitters never win
How long it takes to understand
God is exactly the same to knowing
What it takes for god to have sin
On some account I bet high, you were the same
You’ve been a shooting star here from beginning to end.

Let it be said here: don’t look for emerging alternative arts in New York City in the museums or the galleries in Chelsea, or even off, off Broadway.

It exists under Broadway, in the subway.

**

When I moved back to the U.S. a year ago, from five years of living abroad in Eastern and Central Europe – specifically, Hungary, Armenia and Croatia – I came to New York thinking my fledgling artist soul would thrive here.

I had previously fed it with drawing and painting lessons by masters in countries where I lived, by hanging with artists in their carved out studios in concrete soviet apartment blocks and wasting away neighborhoods, and by doing and teaching art. Over time, I worked with groups of regular and semi-regular students who came to the ateliers I held in a variety of falling down buildings. (One of the more memorable classrooms, in Yerevan, Armenia, was literally held up by two wooden posts planted roughly in the ground. The toilet lay broken on its side, so we ran to the luxury hotel next door when we needed to go. We could draw on the walls. My students loved it.)

I learned that even though I loved teaching, that I couldn’t earn enough money teaching part-time – even with the 40 or so regular students I built up in Zagreb, Croatia – to support myself with enough time for my own painting. I needed to be able to pick up a bit more side work to be able to pay for my painting habit.

So I returned to the U.S., to the Big Apple, to the mecca of creativity that had spawned so many great artists, assuming I could plug into the artist community, that I’d be able to teach part-time, work part-time and still be able to paint.

When my friends who lived in New York said “You know, it’s very expensive and very hard to find work here now,” I pooh-poohed them. I had long ago given up the notion that my work had to have status – I’d do anything, from bartending to dishwashing to cleaning houses to editing, as long as I could work part-time. I figured there would be plenty of students interested in the independent classrooms I’d set up overseas, where students worked on their own projects with my supervision.

Boy, was I wrong.

**

When I first arrived, I loved the energy of the city, but I most of all loved the artistry existing in the subways. What artistry, you say?

There are dancers, musicians, singers, spoken word poets, and a variety of other hucksters playing for a buck. It’s common for a group of performers or musicians to get on a train, announce and perform a quick dance or play a song, and then pass around a can at the next stop.

I was thrilled, and I always gave money. It takes balls to perform like that, in front of a hostile crowd. I loved it. I saw break-dancing, heard flamenco guitar, and listened enrapt as a guy gave the most soulful rendition of “stand by me” I’ve heard in a long time.

Some of it was good, some not-so-good and some a little trite, but it was authentic and real and very present.

Above ground, though, I was having more trouble fueling the dream.

Escape from New York/By Leah Kohlenberg/Pastel and acrylic on paper/October 2011

Though I managed to find a beautiful apartment in Brooklyn at a more-than-reasonable price by New York City standards (thank you, old school chum, Katherine Barger), it was still twice as much as I’d paid anywhere else. I tried to set up classes, but managed to draw only a handful of students (people are busy, I was told, and I’m competing with a lot of art classes offered by prestigious art schools). Even my signature family art classes, where the entire family learns to draw together, weren’t taking hold as quickly as I liked.

I turned down two full-time job offerings when I first got to the city – I didn’t WANT a full-time job, I wanted to teach and work part-time and paint. But I later painfully discovered that the only way to support myself in New York was to take a full-time job. So I wound up in a stupid office job, which was so boring and draining that I’d come home exhausted and unable to lift a paint brush.

The part-time jobs, dishwashers and bartenders and house cleaners, were all taken: I went to one bartending interview to find 25 people waiting for the same job. And another 25 people were lined up on day two of the interview process. The financial crisis had arrived in NYC, and it was here to stay.

I began looking for more meaningful full-time work, but even those jobs weren’t available to me. I was too over-qualified, I was told over and over again, why didn’t I go for an editor-in-chief job or something of that ilk? No one seemed to understand that I was switching professions and didn’t want my day job to leak into my real one, painting.

In the meantime, my own painting languished – instead of working four to five days a week, I was relegated down to working one (or possibly two, if there was a holiday), on Sunday. I spent the rest of my days biking around New York City from my full-time gig to my few students, and I was barely making enough to pay my bills. And plugging into the artist community? I barely had time to see my friends, let alone meet new people, in this city that never sleeps.

When I went to the museums and the galleries, the energy that I felt in the performances under the street left me. I don’t want to blame the institutions, though: this really WAS about me. I was depressed, because I couldn’t get enough time to paint, and when I saw artists who did, I felt even more discouraged.

“I’ve never seen you more soul-killed than I have now,” a friend told me honestly, and I had to agree.

Unless I was 20-something, or had a partner with a full-time job, or was willing to live in shared housing (something NO ONE after 40 should do), I realized that New York was not a city in a position to support MY emerging artist. That made me sad. I like New York, I wanted it to work. But it simply wasn’t.

So I have bid the city, and its subway full of underground artists, goodbye. I’m moving to Oregon, back to the Pacific Northwest, the region where I grew up, in January. Back to the drawing board, I hope.

A former landlord of mine once told me, as he gently threw me out of his house in New Hampshire, “I like you, Leah, but I just can’t live with you.”

Same to you, New York. I like you, but I just can’t live with you. God bless, and god speed. I’m looking for my shooting star that George Thomas quoted to me under the subway six months ago.

*George Thomas, The Apparatus Of GifT’D UnderGround Artist, Iammr.thomas@hotmail.com

My mommy/pastel on paper, with the young artist and her mom, Iseult, in Zagreb.

ZAGREB, Croatia – All was chaos in my quiet two-bedroom apartment one late Friday afternoon.

I was supposed to be assessing the artistic level of my friend Agnes’ four-year-old daughter, so I could figure out which kid’s class to put her in. But Agnes’ two-year-old son was tearing around the house, screaming and yelling with glee and terrorizing my cat. I was finishing reviewing the speech of Dora Fila, a young woman who runs a specialty tour company in Zagreb, who was giving a speech at the International Women’s Club (of which I was a standing board member, though that’s another story). She had just come from a day of translating another workshop, and was quite harried.

Then suddenly, Agnes’ husband arrived and whisked the little boy away.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh….” We heard him scream, and then a car door slam shut, and then … silence.

Agnes, her daughter, and the young woman all looked at me wearily.

“Would you like to learn how to draw a bird?” I asked them all, gently. It just came out. I hadn’t planned it. The only one scheduled to do art that day was Agnes’ daughter.

Without a word, the two women and one small girl walked into my studio and sat in front of an easel.  I taught them how to draw a bird, which they then spent the next two hours coloring in as they pleased. Where before there were four conversations going on simultaneously, now there was only the rhythmic scratching of pen on paper. It was very, very nice. Everyone drew good birds.

And that, quite simply, cemented something I now feel I always knew: kids and adults should learn art together.

**

I wasn’t always a proponent of teaching children. But it seemed, children were always following me.

When I taught my first pastel class ever in Budapest, Hungary, all my students were adults except for 11-year-old Emil. His mom Jennifer asked if he could try it. I told her he was welcome, but that I’d expect him to put in the same time and concentration in that the adults did.

And Emil did. It was very cute to see this young bespectacled boy seriously tackling the assignment I have given the class – to draw a lily. His result was so good, his mom made greeting cards out of it, and while I’ve moved around many places, I keep a couple of copies with me wherever I go.

11 year old Emil's lily, immortalized in this card. He insisted his mother keep the testing marks below because it was part of the art.

Ah, but Emil was a special case, I told myself. Not all kids are like that.

Then I moved to Yerevan, Armenia, where I lived and taught art for two years. My friend Hasmik asked me to offer lessons for her son, Argi, who was nine years old. He had been shaken up by a burglary at his house – the robber had come through his bedroom window! – and he asked his mom for drawing lessons. “Something to help me relax,” he told her.

So I took on Argi. Once or twice a week, he and his non-English speaking grandpa would trudge to my studio. I’d give him all the same activities I assigned to the adult students (because I really didn’t know how to teach differently). He pushed me to show him more – after practicing drawing faces, he did a masterpiece of his grandfather (who had conveniently fallen asleep on my couch, so was an exceptional model).

Ah, but Argi and Emil are special cases, I told myself.

Then I moved to Zagreb, Croatia. A lovely Irish woman named Iseult joined my art classes, she said, to “keep up with her five-year-old daughter’s art classes.” Soon after, I decided to offer a Mother-daughter portrait drawing class, and five-year-old Sadbh (pronounced “Sigh-be”), was the youngest but by far the most dogged in the group. She produced a stellar portrait of her mom, and she began coming to the adult classes regularly with her mother.

Then a French family, the Lehes, signed up for an intensive art week during a French School Holiday. One my regular adult students, Sandrine would work on her own projects while I’d show her three young children how to draw animals, do landscapes and city scapes. All week, we worked hard every day (Sandrine was a hard worker). Her kids followed suit. They would leave after several hours, exhausted but happy.

Now, besides the fact that I adore Emil, Argi, Sadbh and the Lehe family to pieces – they are extraordinary children – I was beginning to wonder whether they were in fact, the exception, or the rule in keeping up in art class.

I got a chance to test that theory soon after in Zagreb when four moms and their kids signed up to take art lessons together with me. Called “Family Art,” it was by far one of the most dynamic and interesting classes I ever taught, with students ranging in age from three-year-old Kylie up through her 60-something grandma, Kory.

Argi's grandpa/2009/pastel, pencil and ink on paper/Argishti Avetisyan, Yerevan, Armenia

I usually started with the same drawing lesson, which everyone did. Then the adults broke off into their art projects, and the kids would have a choice – they could work quietly on their own paintings side by side with their parents, or work with a separate teacher I hired to do arts and crafts.

Many, many miraculous things happened in that Family Art Class. For one thing, the kids, without exception and no matter how young, learned how to work independently side-by-side with their parents, FOR HOURS AT A TIME! It usually took a couple of classes: when kids were new, they tended to get bored the first class or two, and then clingy. They’d grab their mother’s pen out of her hand and scribble on her drawing. They’d whine. They’d fuss.

But I explained the studio rules to them (issued to me by Iseult, who could see this class coming a mile off):
No touching someone else’s paper unless you get permission (including your mom’s).

No making fun of anyone’s drawing – including your own.

Respect your own imagery.

After about two classes, the kid stopped disrupting their parent, and began modeling after the parent – drawing on their own, or working with a teacher on a craft, or sitting at the easel next to their parent and working on their own project. It was empowering for the kids to be doing the same lesson as their parents, for at least part of the class. The parents got to move forward on more complex projects, without having to worry or watch their kids all the time. The class, which started Mondays at 6 p.m., would go for several hours (sometimes involving, for the grownups, a bottle of wine or two).

Everyone got very relaxed about art. Everyone, without exception, got better at art. It became one of my favorite parts of the week.

**

Conventional wisdom on teaching art has you divide children up by age when teaching drawing and painting. The younger children will get frustrated that they can’t do what the older children can do, the theory goes. It made perfect sense to me at the time, but the more I experience the multi-age dynamic, the more I prefer it.

Nina started taking art lessons with Baby Freda in Zagreb in January. What a great experience for mom and child!

I moved to New York City in February, and what interests me is that my family art classes are definitely not catching on here as quickly as they have in other places. In New York, I’ve been advised, the adults want you to treat their child like a little genius, a movie star, or a major talent. I don’t know if that’s true, but  I am fundamentally against such ideas. I think it’s silly to treat a child any differently than an adult in the class (except, in some cases, in what they are physically able to do). I think children don’t want to be held up on pedestals. They want to spend time with the adults in their lives, and they learn by watching and mimicking the adults in their lives learn.

All I know is that now, my ideal class has an age range from 3-80, and when I look out I don’t see young child-serious adult. I just see art students.

Leah Kohlenberg is an artist, writer, and frequent flier who is currently living in Brooklyn, New York. You don’t have to be in New York to take classes, though: Leah is offering online art courses and art consultations! For more details, visit: http://artistholidays.wordpress.com/

“What’s wrong, Max?” I asked, as we stood over the first draft of a watercolour and ink cityscape we’d started painting. He pointed at the boxes of warm colours he’d painted onto the paper – one box colour had flowed into another’s, and worse off, his blue sky was bleeding into the top of all the boxes.

“You are worried it won’t look good, but its fine,” I told him. “The imperfections will actually add texture. Go work on something else. You’ll see when it dries.”

Max looked at me doubtfully, but walked away. It was the same look his mother gave me, but she wasn’t so quick to drop her skepticism. She’d just finished an underdrawing for a pastel she was preparing, and the drawing wasn’t quite like the painting she had chosen to copy.

“It’s ruined,” said Sandrine, gazing stolidly and sadly at her drawing.

“Well if that’s the case,” I told her, “Just take it into the other room, attach it to an easel, and practice on it. You’ll redraw another one next time.”

Normally, Sandrine is one of my most enthusiastic and disciplined students. When she comes to class, she works consistently. But for some reason, her so-called mistake had paralyed her. She didn’t move. She just sat, helplessly, staring at the paper in front of her.

“Sandrine, follow me,” I said, standing up, picking up her paper, and moving it into the other room, attaching it to a board on an easel. “Come on. Come ON!”

She got up dejectedly and walked over to the easel.

**

Why did I spend so much time on the stories of this delightful French family, who have been taking art lessons together with me in Zagreb for several months?

Sandrine's beautiful pastel, which she made after she thought she had "failed" in making the proper underdrawing. "The moment you told me it wasn't important to finish it, I was able to start," she said.

It’s true that after 15 minutes, both Sandrine and Max were busily and happily working creating finished paintings with their so-called “mistakes,” both of them creating one of the most sophisticated and lovely works they’ve done in my class.

(They gave me permission to re-tell their stories on this blog, by the way).

“It’s amazing,” said Sandrine. “The moment you told me it didn’t matter, I was able to start.”

But the real truth is that their stories stand out to me because they were like mirrors reflecting my inner struggle.

When I first started painting seven years ago, I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t draw, I hadn’t shown “an aptitude” for art in school, I got overwhelmed and confused when I walked into an art supply store. All I knew was that I was supposed to be a writer, and I was trying to write a book – and I was blocked. The book was about owning a fixer upper house, which I was in the process of doing when I wrote it. A four-bedroom junker that I had torn down and built back up again.

I painted each wall, of each room, of that four-bedroom house a different colour. That’s why I started out my artistic career sitting on my front porch and painting abstract designs on wood scraps, using leftover house paint. I just doodled and painted wild, abstracted shapes. Because of course, I couldn’t do anything else yet.

I got better, over time. I took drawing classes, I tried to paint every day. When I left the U.S. five years ago, I went searching for classical instruction. I found it, in Budapest, through my friend and fellow artist Lado Pochkhua, who taught me how to use oils. I found it, in my friend and fellow artists Hakob Hovannisyan and Zara Manucharyan, who taught me some drawing basics.

I assigned myself a set of tasks: learn to draw still lifes by doing many of them. Learn to do portraits by assigning myself to a series. The first portrait commission I took gave me a rush of fear. I had taken half the money up front, and what if it wasn’t good enough? Those moments were and are still hard, but the goal is tangible – a realistic portrayal of the person. If it doesn’t work, try again.

As I got better at the technical thing, I began leaving behind the doodling. The goofing. The painting, as Sandrine says, which only happens when you think it doesn’t matter anymore.

The less I doodled and meandered, the more wrong I felt. The more depression came up.

It was a slippery slope. Even though I can and could look objectively at those freer early works, or my more recent doodles, and see the right in them, or the life at least, I felt wrong.

(I even feel wrong as I write this blog post – I picked the wrong stories, have drawn the wrong conclusions, am offering the wrong details. Never mind, I’ll get on with it, but you get my drift).

Sandrine and Max taught me, though, that this feeling is universal: even when we are right, we can feel very, very wrong.

**

On Monday nights, I teach a family art class – 3-4 parents who each bring 2-3 of their young children, ranging in age from 3-12. I realized, though, that the younger kids needed someone working with them more intensively, so I could work with the older kids and the adults do the “real art.” I didn’t intentionally or consciously call it that, but it was how I felt. That the little kids couldn’t “handle” art instruction, and were more chaotic. They didn’t like being told what to do, and were often tired by the step-by-step drawing and painting lessons I created for them. My unconscious assumption, therefore, was that it wasn’t Art, with a capital A, if I am to make a true confession.

So I hired a teacher, a cheerful, bohemian young free spirit named Anna, a friend whom I met when I first arrived in Zagreb a year ago. Anna is a trained pre-school teacher and is naturally, in her spirit, non-hierarchichal in her thinking. Now I pop back and forth between my second bedroom, which is the studio containing a ragtag assortment of easels, and the “kids crafts table,” which is set up in my living room and consists of two sawhorses and a door-sized hunk of wood placed on top. Mostly, I listen, though I do pop into help.

Last week, I peered into the living room and saw Anna’s table, covered with yellow, orange, blue and red feathers, tape, rice boxes, cups and six children, including a new five-year-old named Reed, and his 3-year-old brother, Kurt. Not surprisingly, the two boys were having trouble settling into working on art projects in a new environment while their mom was in the other room painting. The fidgeted and fussed and ran around the room a bit. Reed got upset, and started to screw his face up to cry.

Anna, who was managing four other kids at the time, plopped a paper in front of him and said “Draw your anger.”

Making this "anger painting" stopped tears for five-year-old Reid at a family art class recently.

This stopped Reed cold for minute. Then he covered the paper in blue paint and black marks, settled down and moved onto a new picture.

I came in and looked at it. “Is this your anger, Reed?” I asked, handling the piece delicately, staring at it.

He nodded calmly, anger released, now entirely intent on drawing a snow man.

A week later, I couldn’t get “Reed’s Anger” out of my mind. So when I was at his mom, Kim’s house, helping her set up a studio where my students will go when I leave the country in two weeks, I asked him if I could photograph it.

He smiled and agreed.

“Do you remember why you painted this?” I asked him.

He looked at me politely but blankly, then shook his head and went back to tumbling around in empty cardboard boxes with his little brother.

**

In September, I took on a number of new students, including Amy. A first-grade teacher at the American International School in Zagreb, Amy and I started out with a photo composition class, and I was immediately struck by how instinctively abstract she was in her photography. I suggested drawing and painting, something she’d never tried.

When I offered a self-portrait class, she requested to do the face of a Buddha. A Buddha, she explained later, that she wanted to do in the style of “Mexican religious folk art.”

“You know,” she explained. “I want jewels, sequins and gold foil. Lots of bling!”

Amy's self-titled "Buddha painting, in the style of Mexican religious art" with plenty of bling!

I probably don’t need to tell you the portrait is amazing – delicious, actually. Pure yum. I watched someone else look at it and melt.

The other day, Amy came for art class. A friend of mine from the International Women’s Club, Lana, was visiting to view some of my paintings. When we invited her to join us in a warm-up exercise, the look of fear in her eyes was palpable.

“Oh no, I can’t do art!” she said. “I was terrible at it in school.”

But I pushed Lana, sensing she might enjoy it, and to be polite, she obliged. We all created water colour and ink cityscapes together – step-by-step, the same exercise I had taught Max earlier. The tension melted, we chattered away. They were beautiful.

(I just chatted with Lana yesterday, and she told me she’d walked her 7-year-old son through the same exercise. At first he was skeptical, she said: “This doesn’t look like a city,” he kept saying. But she told him to keep on until, suddenly, wonder popped into his face: “oh wow, this IS a city.” Right on, Lana!)

After Lana left, Amy brought out a cubist art lesson she’d learned on the internet that she wanted to try. I sort of followed the directions, but didn’t really. Amy tried to correct me, but stopped soon after, realizing I was on a roll. We both took that assignment in totally different directions (see the two paintings at the front of this blog!). We enjoyed the hell out of it. We released the results. And I loved what came out!

Sometimes, all we need is to give ourselves permission. And for someone else to give us a little push. Sometimes, it will be you pushing, and other times, if you are lucky, someone will give you a little push, too.

wide world/acrylic and pastel on canvas/November 2010/Zagreb, Croatia

There are days in the studio, I confess, where my spirit and my brush sags.

There are also days when I am on fire, where I’m pushing myself beyond my normal limits.

Both of these things are the norm for me. I’m a born fighter. When I decided to be painter at 33, I didn’t even know how to draw (some would argue I still don’t ). The dogged road is the one I best follow, putting all this excess energy I’ve got to use in struggling with an oil portrait of the face, for example, or pushing myself to get the ethos of a street corner correctly.

I don’t like school, so instead I make myself learn the hard, grit-my-teeth, and turtle-slow way. Painting 4-5 days a week, sometimes more, whether I feel like it or not. Working like crazy after that painting time to make enough money to bring in my rent. This, I am used to.

What still puzzles me are days like today, when my will is gone and my ego vacant, when I have no desire to work on any of my half-finished projects. When I finally get out of my own way, and just let the brush work on it’s own, what comes out is always a surprise, and it’s not so etched in the painful pushing of my ordinary work day. When these paintings come, they come quickly – in ten minutes, in an hour or two, tops.

Valley/acrylic and pastel on wood/Zagreb, Croatia/November 2010

I call it jam painting – listening to music, or watching a film, and putting marks randomly on paper or canvas. Then I step back and look at what emerges, and spend a few minutes pulling out the details. Sometimes its random and abstract, other times wild and colourful scenes form. I’d like to teach it to my students, my only hesitancy being that I can’t explain where it comes from.

I can’t help but like them. I can’t help but think this might be voice. My voice. Why do I make it so hard to just sit and listen to it?

This is one of my new painting series, Women: Cracked. Each oil painting features the face of one or more women, split up over several canvases, which can be shown as a cohesive whole (such as “Nini in Prague”) or split up in provocative ways (such as “Armenian Shushi Bride”). Most of the women are real people I’ve met in my travels, but some come from images I collected from postcards, or are a homage to painters I’ve come across during my stays in Armenia, Georgia and Croatia.

To find out more about these women, click on the thumbnails of the portraits above – you’ll get a larger size view and the story behind the painting.

All paintings are for sale, please contact me at leah.kohlenberg@gmail.com if you are interested, or go to my website, www.leahkohlenberg.com, to see more of my latest work.

In September, I took four women from the International Women’s Club Zagreb (IWCZ) – of which I was recently elected to the board – for a three-hour photo composition class. I instructed students to shoot as many photos as possible during a short walk around Zagreb – as many as 1 photo every ten seconds. The idea was to get them identifying and following what they found aesthetically interesting, and to break the “thinking too much” composition shots that often turn out stale. We later reviewed the photos over cappuccinos at a local coffee shop together to find the individual patterns and compositional strengths of each participant. The slideshow shows their very excellent results!

CLASS DETAILS: One three-hour class (including review time) is 50 Kuna per person, plus you provide your own digital camera. These classes are held regularly, and drop ins are welcome, so contact me at leah.kohlenberg@gmail.com to find out when the next class will be held, and where we meet!

My neighborhood - Zagreb/By Leah Kohlenberg/Oil on Canvas, May 2010

People often ask me why I came to Zagreb.

It’s only recently that I’ve figured out the answer – sanctuary.

The Croatians are masters of sanctuary. The tiny, crescent-shaped country of roughly four million people hugs some beautiful Adriatic coastline, even more beautiful inland mountains and waterways, and is generally a breadbasket for the region. Croatians work hard, but at the end of the day, virtually every Croatian I know has created some small space to sit, have a cup of coffee, be away from the hustle and bustle of urban life. Often, this place is draped in grape vines, potted flowers and has a view of some trees. During the summers, people routinely take 3-6 weeks to go to their own or their relatives or friends houses somewhere “on the coast.” This is quiet time. Even in these modern times, people rarely check their e-mail and settle into a slower pace.

I didn’t know it, when I arrived here seven months ago, but this is often the way of people who need sanctuary – they are so wound up, they don’t even know that they need it. I am no exception.

**

To trace my journey honestly, I have to go back further – about nine years ago, when I decided, against all odds, to become an artist. I was living in a four-bedroom house, a fixer-upper I had bought with the mad money to be made in online writing in the early 2000s. I wanted to become an artist, which meant I needed time to paint. And my nice tidy life as a journalist, getting paid for my work … well, it had to go. Which meant so did my steady income, and my house, and any hopes of a regular job.

I wish I could say it was a conscious decision, to leave my big house and my old life behind. Instead, it was more of a force-out situation: I got a $700 water bill, and I couldn’t afford to pay it. This is was 2004, and the financial crash had long since dissipated those mad-money writing jobs.  I was faced with this fact: that if I wanted to be an artist, and put in the time it took to become an artist, I had to cut down, drastically.  I would also have to find part-time work that paid well enough to support me while I painted, preferably at night.

So I sold the big house (barely breaking even on the sale), and I took a job as a bartender at the Seattle Art Museum. I painted in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle’s University District. The moment I signed all the house sale papers, and the wave of financial relief washed over me, I fell into a depression.

All of a sudden, the things I had worked for in my life – the journalism career, the house, the normal life for cripes sake – I had thrown out the window. For what, though? I knew I didn’t want them, but what DID I want? You can change the setting, but it’s not so easy to thrown out of those dreams.

I began to feel increasingly isolated, and surly. Sure, I painted. When I wasn’t pouring booze at private parties, I stayed up late watching reruns of Becker and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television. I picked fights with virtually everyone I knew – friends, family, everyone got it. I gained weight.

I woke up at night in that apartment – which I lived in for two years – every evening confused, staring at the ceiling and wondering where I was. It was more of a metaphorical question than a real one. I knew in a concrete way that I lived there, I just didn’t know who I was, or what I should be striving for. I didn’t feel like I fit in.

After two years of this pain, I decided to leave the U.S. If I was going to wake up wondering where I was, I figured, I might as well really not know.

**

First stop was Budapest, in 2006. It was close to where my Jewish relatives came from – there is a little town in Austria called Kohlenberg. Plus, the Lonely Planet guide to Eastern Europe kept opening to the Budapest page when I would ask it – like a magic eight ball – where I should go. You might think I’m kidding, but I was so lost, I had as much faith in those random decisions as I did any logical, more analytical process that my brain could produce.

So to Budapest I went, and with it, I found friends, fell in with artists, and met one of my teachers and good friends, Lado Pochkhua, a Georgian painter now living in New York. I also helped another American artist, Paula Brett, start an informal art school, by renting one room in the three-room flat she procured, and teaching a pastel drawing class and running a weekly open figure drawing studio on Friday nights. Lado taught me how to use oil paints, and I exploded with ideas and paintings and art.

Budapest was a mixed blessing for me. I loved the looming, baroque architecture that is reminiscent of  many places, making Budapest a one-stop movie-making capitol (the city has been disguised to look like Rome, Paris and London in the 2005 film Munich, as Buenos Aires in Evita, as the dark city where vampires roam in Underworld).

I managed to eke out a living teaching English and art for a living, bolstered by my old work as a journalist trainer, where I traveled to Armenia several times a year. I ate a lot of lentils and rice, rode a bike everywhere, and lost weight.

But after awhile, I began to feel bad again. Budapest haunted me, particularly the former Jewish quarter where I lived – and not just because I was on the same street as the “House of Terror” Museum, a former torture chamber of dissidents that now houses a monument to the depth of the Soviet regime’s ugliness and cruelty. I say former Jewish quarter, because though the city tried initially to protect its Jews, in 1944, virtually all the Jews were rounded up and kept in a park for several days without food or water, before being shipped off to Auschwitz (where they built special ramps to bring in so many people).

I used to walk by that park every day, knew people who lived there, and the only reason I know the story is that friends who run a tourist business told me about it, that many bodies were buried underneath that park. It was a dog walking park now. No signs, no memorial, no nothing. It disturbed me, and I began to understand the Hungarian melancholy that is so pervasive to both foreigners and expats alike: though it is hard to face the past, pushing it under the rug causes pain, too.

I believe that just like everything else, we are drawn to countries where we are at, similarly, in our own psyche.

I knew I didn’t want to hold onto suffering by burying it. So Budapest taught me something, which is to start doing the hard work of looking at what stories I was telling myself (or not telling myself) that were holding me back, and creating unnecessary pain.

Then, in the nick of time, I fell in love – and moved to Armenia.

(to be continued…)

“No one will come to art lessons in the summer in Zagreb,” I was told over and over again. “Everyone goes to the Croatian coast.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth in my ongoing art classes this summer, though – particularly once I expanded the offerings to include plenty of kids classes.

As the weather inside and out of the studio got hotter, so did the fire of creativity and artistic inspiration. Check out my slideshow here to see for yourself!

Anna K./pastel on paper/By Leah Kohlenberg/Zagreb, June 2010

Rustle, rustle. Rustle, rustle. Rustle.

This noticeable, out-of-the ordinary noise, the sound of paper being crumpled and un-folded, was gentle, but persistent background music to the art class I was teaching last week.

Ah well, I figured, the garbage can is right outside my ground floor classroom, and we had the windows open because it was hot.

I turned my attention back to the four students sitting in front of me – a determined just-turned-six-year-old; her Irish mom who takes classes with her daughter to keep up with her child’s art knowledge; a Romanian 38-year-old mother of two, who has found a latent talent in art in the past two years and wants to become a professional artist; and a Croatian journalist and interpreter, who is there to cover the art class for a story, but who at my insistence is nervously trying the lesson I’m teaching.

Why do art?

The answers are as different as the students in my classroom. More amazing (to me at least) is that all these disparate desires can fit in the same classroom, doing the same lesson.

As I walk them through drawing a simple still-life, a teapot and a vase, and then let them work on filling in the color themselves, I’m amazed at how easily they slip into the painting zone. Of course, with different students, I emphasize different elements. With Tunde, the most serious art student, I’ll suggest she show light and shadow, while young Sadhbh I emphasize putting all the elements into the painting, like making sure she draws the line that delineates where the floor and ceiling meet, for instance.

But as I help Sadhbh come up with a way to cover some extra, unwanted lines in her composition, Anika, the journalist, leans in to listen. Anika kept telling me she was “only going to watch,” and that she needed to leave in 30 minutes. She wound up staying for the entire three hours.

“I was frozen,” she admitted later. “I hadn’t drawn since I was a child, and I didn’t know if I could do it. But it wasn’t so hard.”

This is what teaching art in Zagreb is reminding me these days: that you don’t need to be an Artist, with a capital A, to do art, to benefit from art, to enjoy art. Just as there are many types of artists, there are many types of art students.

Rustle, rustle. Rustle, rustle. Rustle.

There was that noise again.

“Oh yes,” says Iseult, Sadhbh’s mom. “You had thrown some sketches away from one of the classes, and an old scruffy man, who was sifting through the garbage for bottles, was carefully opening each one and examining it quite closely. He was pulling them out and had one spread out on each garbage lid.”

And apparently, there are many types of art appreciators, too.