Nataliya Scheib
TEXTURED MEMORY - WALLS OF CHANGING COLORS
I have created this textural painting from a memory of my childhood house in Ukraine. It was the first house that my parents could afford to buy on the savings from their salaries. We lived there until I turned about four years old. I still see our old house in my mind - it had just one room, in the corner of which stood a wood-burning iron stove, used for cooking and for heating the house. From the outside the house looked like an earthen hut. The walls were rubbed and covered with a clay-based mixture that was mostly white with blends of some other particles. The inside walls were also covered with the white clay mixture. This house had a straw roof, just like the old-time houses in the Ukrainian villages.
Even as a very young child, I knew that the outside walls of our house were supposed to look white, and they were at the beginning of each time it was cured, but for a very short time. After every time it rained or snowed, it affected the colors of the house walls, and they would change into a variety of different shades. After a long and a harsh winter with lots of snow and hail, the clay rub would start looking beat with numerous little pieces hung down; it looked very textural and every color but white. As I was a young child, every day on my walk to day-care and back, I would look at the house to see how it changed day by day with the weather. I remember my mother would have to make the white finish and reapply it every spring with her bare hands.
The house was eventually demolished and a brick one was rebuilt on its place by my father, who was a master brick layer in his spare time. However, our old house with its cake-like coating still stays fresh in my memory so many years later.
Nataliya Scheib
"Textured Memory - Walls of Changing Colors", 2015- 2016
Oil on collage on Wood Panel
40" x 34"