Title: Blueprints of Memories: The Breath of Siberia
Author: Olga Timofeyeva
Publisher: BookSide Press
ISBN: 978-1778831577
Pages: 110
Genre: Non-fiction / Art
Reviewed by: David Allen

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It’s happening…. And always has been! Everywhere you look there are gentle and sometimes not-so-gentle reminders that the Big World Out There is very much alive with promise, with rejoinder, with wake-up calls from kindred spirits across the globe.

Sometimes the wake-up call comes from on high, from Parnassus. Or in this case from the evocative and precious Oil paintings gifted us in this eye-candy gift of a volume by the artist/Russian expatriate/survivor Olga Timofeyeva.

Olga and her scintillant tableaux come to us from ‘over there.’ Timofeyeva was born in Siberia, in the former Soviet Russia. She was raised by her grandmother there amid harsh conditions. By 1977 Olga and her 10-year-old daughter cut the cord, leaving Mother Russia for the United States. At this point in the backstory, the artist narrowly escapes one inferno only to find herself in another: at age 54 she is diagnosed with cancer.

Faced with cancer, Olga pushes back — heroically. With the robust and tender assistance of staff at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, Olga regains not only her health but a whole new perspective on the world.

A former systems analyst, the new Olga, paintbrush in hand, delivers to the world a series of heartthrob oil paintings that speak volumes not only to the vibrancy of her colors, her eye, her palette, but to the relevance and healing power of art no matter its genesis.

Carnival, for example, depicts a Punchinello of indeterminate age and gender, posing with a fanciful if not magically real kitty. The Oil painting defies genre and localization. It is neither a painting on black velvet nor is it a happy clown. It is a pensive clown. In Before Storm, a young woman dressed in blue, with two ambiguous figures in the near distance, feels the stiff wind before her and the ocean behind. The brush strokes are generous, thick and lavish. The coming squall threatens to consume.

Many of Timofeyeva’s perspectives are pensive and triste. However, each is informed by her great humanity, by dollops of humor and sadness that truly give pause. Timofeyeva’s ostensible genre launches from impressionistic sources to sheer unbridled exuberance of her very own.

Amazing book! At age 54, Olga Timofeyeva, face-to-face with a couple of major personal storms, did what any right-thinking artist-person would do: she looked at her world, at her land of origin, and within these 100-plus pages, she demonstrates that art is truly transformative and trans-national, if not heavenly, in scope.