We met with Jenya Skubina @jenny_cycles on the online art course in winter 2021, and after some time, I ran into her maps of Amsterdam, NYC & Moscow.
After being in a pandemic and locked in the country for about a year seeing those maps made me realize once again how badly I love and want to travel.
I've been to Moscow many times, I've wanted to visit Amsterdam and the Netherlands very much for a long time by that moment, and I have these precious memories of traveling to NYC and seeing all these people walking their dogs and missing my friends there. What I could do in that situation is to dive into my imagination and, in some cases, into my sweet memories.
Jenya's maps are rich in details and characters, and I've picked one element from each map and turned them into stained glass pieces.
It's been a while that I wanted to mix classic stained glass with ultra-modern plexiglass, and I decided to try it on this work.
AMSTERDAM
`A black house`
Shortly before a pandemic happened, I'd started following a pair of bloggers from Amsterdam by chance. One of them @art_city_amsterdam moved there with her family when she was 11 years ago. She is a teacher in a primary school and an art specialist. Another woman @natalia.remish moved there around six years ago from Russia, and she is a writer of books for kids and a popularizer of psychology although she always points out that she is not a psychologist.
Both of them show through their blogs how society works from kids to grow-ups in the Netherlands. And I fell in love with many of their principles. Since then I have wanted badly to visit this city and country and wish to live there for some time.
What else could I grab from that map other than a girl with the dog?
The last time when I was in the city in 2019, I lived at my friend's not far from Prospect Park in Brooklyn and spent lots of time there watching people walking their adorable dogs or dog walkers who were dealing with about a dozen of them at once - that's a real case, I am not kidding. Dogs were so happy there - fetching balls, swimming in the pond, playing with each other. It seemed to me that this city LOVES the dogs.
