Bread and sea

Ada Rybachuk, 1962
Canvas, tempera

Our house stood right above the sea.

There was a table in front of the window. A loaf of bread lay on it. The table was covered in knots and scratches. Ada asked me to cut a slice and place it beside the loaf so that the texture of the wood could be seen.

She worked very attentively on every detail. Inside the house, she painted the bread, then went down to the shore and worked on the sea there. It was important to her to capture every wave, every white crest.

Ada worked quickly. She did not like to linger over a single painting for too long. She would begin and finish it in about an hour.

The bread was slightly underbaked, but it had a beautiful golden-brown crust. Afterwards, we ate it. And it was remarkably delicious.

Volodymyr Melnichenko

Beside one of the windows stands a table. The most ordinary kind: homemade, hastily put together, low. You can still see on its top the places where the plane slipped, leaving uneven grooves. These boards are pine.

Pine boards. Once they were pine trees. They were trees. They rustled. They grew upwards, cutting vertically across the horizon. On our island, that is difficult even to imagine. Here, the largest tree is no thicker than an ordinary pencil, and its leaves are smaller than the nail on your little finger.

On our island, you do not immediately realise that you are walking through a dense forest. All the trees have intertwined their branches, clung to the hill, pressed themselves against it, flattened themselves to it. Even blades of grass rise higher than this birch forest. Only after a while do you notice that you are stepping on trunks. And the trunks are like birch trunks, and the leaves are birch leaves too — only the trees themselves seem to crawl along the slope of the hill. And then, once again, you fail to notice where the forest ends.

On our island, only the hills hide the horizon with their backs. And the waves do too. In the end, they are the horizons of our island.

So how did the boards from which this table was made come to the island?

It is a long story. More than a year long. We pulled two boards out of the sea after a storm; another we found on the shore — the waves had washed it up, and it remained on the sand when the sea withdrew with the tide.

The other boards arrived by steamship from Arkhangelsk. We begged them from the carpenters who were building another house.

There is another table in our house. A large one. Homemade too. Its thick, heavy boards had once been the door of an old bathhouse. These two tables have completely different characters.

The large table — the one on which we print our engravings — is somehow dignified and serious. But this one is cheerful. It even seems to have a smile, though perhaps it is strange to say such a thing about an object. About a table. But it is almost alive. After all, it was made from living pine boards that were once trees.

Ada Rybachuk