olechko

Copic marker and ink pen in Moleskine
Please email me your bid (starting at $45) if you’d like to own any of these pieces.

Decided to come back to my doodles, quite a few have accumulated since I last posted any here. Oh, and save the date to visit the upcoming show of one of my oils:

ING Discerning Eye opens in London from

13 - 23 November 2008
The Mall Galleries
The Mall
London SW1 Y5BD

Separately about Catalan food: with omelettes served every hour of the day, instituted two breakfasts and very-very  late dinners offering tapas of beans, potatoes and seafood, pan con tomato, manchego cheeses.  For drinks it was the  local bubbly Cava or Rjoha and sometimes sangria , as well as local beer Moritz - all yum!  Had a great time packing myself with  salads like nicoise, great cheese plates, and bocadillos ( with honey and brie and walnuts, brie and tomato with olive oil and lettuce..)  Best food experience we had was at  Cava Fumada in Barcelonetta.  Fine dining experiences were not as memorable, on average the food seemed a bit too greasy with all the pork sausages and all… Maison Jesus and a small place in Gerona (that I don’t remember the name of) were very good.  Almost every single chiringito on the Barcelonetta beach served great shade, view of the sea, drinks and snacks.  It was pleasant to find out the city full of ancient established farmers’ markets where the locals usually stock up for the week.

Katherine Tyrrel at Making the Mark pointed out at the show of entymology illustrators exhibit at Getty.

Just got back from a week long vacation in Barcelona. So much to share: some great architecture, interesting quirky art and local designers.

Check out menchen Tomas (women’s) on c/ rec. 46 and Oscar H. Grand (men’s) on c/barra de ferro 7 for bespoke tailoring. Oscar does his work straight from the shop floor to the coolest music on his ipod. Next door Popi Jabiansky exposes his Pietro della Francesca inspired art at a local internet cafe. (I loved it because I did a similar take on my rents’ portrait several years ago).

Besides there were great local food (pan con tomato and potato/beans/etc. tapas) drinks (rjoha and cava - the catalan bubbly) as well as the Spanish Gothic and Gaudi architecture. My friend Wendy will write a more extended review of this trip on her travel blog and I will link here here soon to give you more detail.

I wanted to go home after a few hours of it. Getting lost on the metro, ending up in Jamaica and then soaking wet under the chilly rain helped that a lot.  When over at the friends house just across the river in Queens, the magnificent view of Manhattan helped put things in perspective though.

We visited three different monasteries in Volyn region today.

The roads leading to the places are bad, lack signs and general depressive ruin of the countryside surrounds everything. Preferred means of transport there are horse-driven carriages. During the summer nature hides all this in much more attractive greenery.

Derman’ dates back XV-XVII century and hosts a lovely woman’s monastery, two churches, a holy well, with ancient row and mot around it. Besides the monastery, an old school, that produced Ulas Samchuk- renowned writer and journalist.

Horodok outside of Rivne sits on an island, old Ukrainian baroque church dates back 1740. The new monastery cathedral has fantastic new wooden decor inside and the warm” church” has a great private feel to it.

Biliv is the youngest women’s monastery of the three, from 1972, owns a fantastic wooden church, and is the hardest to get to.

On the way back we ate at an established inn called Sophia, outside of Rivne. The kinds of place where the local newlyweds come for their photo shoots complete with pretty exotic garden, tennis courts, hotel, solid restaurant and even a recently added live music venue.

Looking for a fine dining experience, Yuri Uzzband and me came to Korona Vitovta - the best restaurant in Lutsk, standing right at the door of the Lubart castle.  It  all started well, the funnest part came with the bill. at the dinner.  We had one glass of wine each,  and the bill modestly displayed six of each ?! ‘Funny,” thought I and went asking about this number 6. “The foreigner (Yuri) asked for a “big” glass of wine,” explained Luda (our waitress).

By now you (who spent some time in Ukraine) all know  that Ukrainian menus like to trick you with items priced by grams, and then the waiters take the liberty at judging how many of those grams your wallet can handle.   Luda’s stab at this problem exceeded all expectations: 6×50=300 grams of wine. “Why didn’t you bring us the whole bottle in that “big” glass?” we asked, very annoyed. “You should have declined the glass when you saw it was 300 gram”. “Forgot my measuring cup at home,”  I defiantly thought. The worst part was that the wine in question was flat. Be on guard if you see too many kinds of wine by the glass in the menu. It could have been sitting open for months, like ours did.

Appalled at this Luda’s lame attempt to trick us, we demonstratively payed the $25 per glass, promising we’d tell every expat to avoid the place. So now you now.  Btw, with the quick poll via blackberry among his “high-flying” friends Yuri Uzzband concluded, that $25 per glass could  cost at only other place in the word - the Beverly Hills Hotel bar!

Everybody, who’s got wheels in Kyiv, climbed the Carpathian mountains to celebrate the New Year’s by the fireplace in the log cabin at the ski resort this season. I did not get there as planned, and was glad to miss the frantic traffic and struggle to find a decent place to sleep after all- good places are booked up there a year in advance. As my smart friend recommended, better times to go there are a few weeks before the holidays or after orthodox Christmas (7-14 January). So I adjusted my plans. Christmas time offers the best entertainment for culture lovers, as the way locals celebrate it, got preserved in its full glory: costumes, caroling, lavish food and all. If I am lucky, I may catch the festivities’ tail end and report on it here. My photographer friend is holding me a spot at the local hata while she fires away her Canon in Verkhovyna as we speak.

The best way to get to the Carpathians from the capital is by car (about 7 hour drive to Yaremche). If you arrive to Yaremche by train (would take a transfer or two to get there from Kyiv) you can hop on a cab for about 150 hrv to Bukovel, which is reasonable considering Yaremche is 40 min away. Obviously putting so much effort into getting there, it can not stand as a weekend kind of trip and is better stretched into 5 days or more.

Accommodations are plentiful and may be secured on the spot if you omit the holidays. The skiing season lasts way past the holidays and into March. My ideal place to stay would be an agrotourism - a local hut with lots of ethnic flare placed on the edge of the village near a stream with a breathtaking view of the mountains. Of course, you have to make sure you can get hot shower/indoor facilities first. Recently a few websites sprung up offering such sights: www.greenworld.com.ua and www.greentour.com.ua.

And finally about Bukovel - the prime ski resort - with European standard facilities as well as prices. My brother came back numb from four days of intense skying and great impressions as he did get up there for the holiday with his friends. He is more into active holidaymaking and seeing everything though his eyes proved to be impressive. You can learn more about all the services, slope maps and specs on Bukovel site.

Besides winter holidays, the Carpathians are attractive during any season. I can’t wait to go down there for a week in the summer to drink fresh goat milk, pick berries and mushrooms and live the simple life. Join me in that to put your money in the Ukrainian Carpathians and help the locals develop their tourism infrastructure to make this beautiful place even more attractive and comfortable to visit. Seems like they get the reinvestment part much better then the Crimea.

21.1.08 Update on the article: Global Comment has also published this article .

Two rival towns going back in sixteen hundreds now are ruins with a palace/castle and a cathedral each. One castle now is a psychiatric hospital, the other - a ruin, home to junkies and stray sheep.

Here are some detailed photo-accounts of the trip by two Ukrainian travel bloggers to Olyka (here too) and to Klevan (and here). And here’s my photo memories of a very wodnerful atmonstperic trip:

The rest of the phots are in this flick set.

Olga Pyl’nyk, another wonderful lvivite, produces very lovely dreamy little sculptures that you can find all around the art galleries in Lviv. You can also find her at L’art Honchari gallery on Andriyivsky in Kyiv, for triple the price. I went for one to Khaos gallery (we like it the most among all the Lviv galleries). She is also well presented by the Green Sofa gallery there with more pictures of her art online.

Khaos gallery, 16 Ruska st., Lviv

Green sofa gallery 7 Virmenska st., Lviv

With a recent visitor from the Sates I spent quite some time browsing the stalls of street art in Kyiv and in Lviv.   I must say, in comparison with the likes in Paris and Rome, Ukrainians actually can offer some very original items. The pricing is so good of course that pretty much anything they offer is much better buy then in the States.

Also, I was set back by an unpleasant targeted pricing there.  The thing is when at the Lviv art market, we set our eye on a very lovely cityscape done with a palette knife - a very recognizable technique (for $80). When on Andriyivsky, I spotted a similar cityscape, and indeed, it was the same Lviv artist piece, just in a slightly bigger format (priced at $280.) Wow, that beats a flight to Lviv and back plus a painting, I thought.

We ended up with these two beauties, by a felllow artist of the lvovite in question.  If you ignore the signature smack across the bottom of the picture, you can get the pure pleasure of enjoying these on our living room wall.

Note: the art market in Lviv is just to the right from the opera when facing it, across the street and into the alley. The original art salespeople all congregate in the middle of that market square.  Don’t forget to bargain. Greatest exuse: my atm only game me this xx amount (and show them the money, looking innocent) but be reasonable- the artist’s got to bring home the cheese.