I'm often surprised by a painting of mine when I haven't seen it for so long. I try to remember why I painted it and what was going on in my life around this time.
The death of Brezhnev and my father seemed to have coincided around the same time. I remember watching on TV the funeral of Brezhnev and being moved by the solemnity of it. My father was born in to Russian parents, although on his birth certificate it states he is Yugoslavian, as that's where he was born. But according to him it was only because his mother happened to be in Yugoslavia at the time.
I never really understood him and I never got the chance to ask him all the questions that I wanted to ask him after he had died when I was older. In a way this painting became a homage to my Russian bloodline and to him.
It's an odd painting even for me. The faces are of my relatives that I found in old black and white photo's from my dad. The old women on the left grieving sometimes looks like the dead mans mother and other times I think of her as his wife. I was never sure who the person was watching on on, hiding amongst the trees, I have a little inkling that maybe it was my fathers estranged brother...but who knows. Very strange!
