REZO KAISHAURI: COMBINING WORK AND PASSION

The beginning of Rezo Kaishauri's creative life concurred with the most dramatic period in the latest history of Georgia — the early 1990's. The collapse of the Soviet Union, formation of independent statehood, the chaos and uncertainty brought by fratricidal civil war — all this echoed loudly in people's hearts and minds.

By that time Rezo studied painting at Nikoladze Art School, the second most demanded art educational institution in Georgia after State Academy of Arts. It was quite hard to get in there — the requirements were extremely high, especially for painting department. While perfectly skilled in graphic arts thanks to the lessons taken from a professional Georgian sculptor and artist, Guram Papinashvili, the oil painting definitely was no easy ride for Rezo, and he had some serious difficulties in qualifying. But soon after getting in, he began to make significant progress in this direction, which did not pass unnoticed and eventually reflected on his marks.

Despite of the initial success and recognition by the mentors, creative spirit of the young artist soon changed into apathy and indifference. The monotonous ordinariness of the curriculum, the scheduled process of education, the hard day-to-day work to achieve the better results — all these required diligence, persistence and other qualities, which young Rezo, apparently, lacked. He would prefer spending hours of his precious time at home, drawing movie posters with colored pencils and gouache, rather than working on a still life at the studio. "They made me paint pots and plaster ornaments, while I wanted to paint naked women!" he will complain later. "Besides, who wants to sit in the zoo and draw monkey sketches, when everything around is boiling in the heat of summer Tbilisi?"

Naturally, it was just an excuse. The real problem was the lack of the ultimate self-determination, the absence of a clear aim. The young artist simply became confused, when trying to choose his path in art. He decided it was all mistake right from the beginning, and that he should leave the school and dedicate his time to other things. Tuned to this wave, he entered one of the many newborn paid "universities" to study English and become an interpreter, seriously preparing to abandon the art school.

Only thanks to his mother's persistence, Rezo changed his mind and decided to finish the school just for the sake of interest, simultaneously continuing with his English and working on a factory as a stencil painter to earn some extra cash. This very period, somewhere in the middle of 1993, by pure accident, he stumbled across something, which changed his art life forever. No, this wasn't Salvador Dali's paintings — that happened much later. It was just an ordinary math copybook, all filled up with strange, weird sketches, drawn with a common ballpoint pen. Somebody had left it on a desk at the university, and while the owner was absent, Rezo had time to peek through a few pages. And that was quite enough — now he knew, what he wanted to draw, although he couldn't name it properly. The word "surrealism" appeared in his lexicon much later.

Literally the same day he provided himself with a blank copybook and a dozen of black ballpoint pens, entitled the copybook as Graphic Fantasies, and began to unleash all possible kinds of monsters and obscene brutalities from the depths of his imagination. The copybook, signed under the pseudonym of Russell Goodcoin (the last name Kaishauri literally reads "good five-kopeck coin" in Georgian), began to fill up with an amazing speed; it became his real obsession, and nothing else interested him anymore. To the great surprise of the author, these black-and-white sketches soon became quite popular in the circle of his acquaintances — mainly due to their impudence, audacity and scandalousness.

It was the first time when Rezo became attracted by the images from coffee grounds. This also happened rather unintendedly — once he was asked jokingly to tell a fortune by the coffee grounds, and he, also jokingly, agreed. "Naturally, I was no good at telling fortunes," he recalls later, "but thus I discovered that coffee grounds actually may contain some very interesting images, and if you look at them long enough, you begin to submerge into another world."

And he submerged, indeed. The very first two sketches, which he called Calvary (later renamed Golgotha) and Regal Execution, had been rapidly followed by loads of others. He drank so many cups of coffee per day, constantly "digging up" the inspiration from its grounds, that it even began to affect his health, eventually causing him to develop some sort of coffee phobia. At the end, he had to stop drinking coffee for good, but there were so many old sketches left, that they could easily provide him with the working material for the next few decades.

In summer of 1994 Rezo finally presented his degree work to the examining board of the art school. It was something in the spirit of his copybook, representing a prostitute with the wings of an angel, sitting on a "stairway from heaven" and gazing somewhere dreamily. Even though the concept was agreed with the board ad interim, the reaction was still a bit hostile: the painting hardly fitted into the requirements of higher art, being too vulgar and poster-like for the refined taste of the board members. Nevertheless, the work was approved, and the diploma issued. Since that Rezo practically never touched a paintbrush — the degree work continues to be his last oil painting so far. From now on he totally turned to graphic art.

Soon after graduating from Nikoladze Art School, Rezo abandoned the paid university, where he studied English — the price for education went up with each year, and the family, which included only him and his mother, couldn't afford it. Working as a "stencil boy" was not exactly the job of his dreams, so he decided to find a better one. By the end of 1994 he finally got himself a new job — as a photo-lab assistant in a serigraphy printing company. Exactly this moment begins his career as a designer.

Being totally absorbed in this new job, still he somehow managed to find time for his beloved copybook. But eventually he felt that this page was already turned, and something new had to emerge. Something was missing in his works, although he couldn't figure out, what exactly.

And then he got it. It happened in the beginning of 1995, in a bookstore, when he (accidentally, as always) stumbled over an album of Salvador Dali's paintings. It was like a revelation, a strike, if you will. He finally found out the missing element in his artwork — the COLOR. And also there he finally discovered the name for the genre he had dedicated himself all this time — SURREALISM.

Then he remembered his long forgotten passion for movie posters, which he drew using mixed media — colored pencils, gouache, Indian ink, ball-point pens, water-colors — shortly, everything close at hand. This gave him a clue to the new technique, which was cheap (a factor of no small importance considering his thin wallet), fast-deployable (it was also important to him being constantly out of time with this new job) and conveniently portable. Besides, he was always better at graphics rather than oil painting. All this, combined with the spirit of the Graphic Fantasies and an overwhelming passion for the opposite sex (so typical for the men born under the sign of Libra) gave rise to what we see today — the artwork full of life and color, fed by inexhaustible "imagination beyond visualization", like one of the website visitors wrote.

Naturally, he began with his "winged prostitute" — it was the right material to experiment with, not so regrettable if spoiled, so to speak. He refined the original "daytime" version, and immediately added two new ones — "evening" and "night". These demi-rep damsels laid the foundation not only to the erotic series later called Body Language, but also to the whole new era in the art of Rezo Kaishauri.

The second thing to do was breathing new life into his so-called "coffee sketches". Rezo couldn't wait to see, what it would be like in color. So the Regal Execution transformed into the Mate to the Queen, which along with two other remakes — Judas Tree and Golgotha — created the ground for the Black Coffee series, considered by the most of the audience as "the best so far".

The period between 1995 and 1997 was most productive in Rezo Kaishauri's creative career. In 1995 he met his elder half-brother, David, for the first time. They instantly became closest friends, as they both shared the same interests and passions — David also was an artist, a graduate from Toidze Art School, and also a great aficionado of Salvador Dali. It was David who became his first real connoisseur, a passionate admirer, inspiring him for more and more ideas and projects. And it was the same David, who acquainted him with the art of Boris Vallejo and invoked the second greatest passion in him after surrealism — the passion for fantasy art. By that time Rezo already had been fallen in love with the fantasy literature, and the idea of trying the genre of illustration had been ripening for quite some time. So, when he began to read Chthon series — an exciting mixture of science fiction and fantasy by Piers Anthony — he decided to capture some moments from the books. Thus came into the being The History of Chthon, Rezo's first serious attempt in the genre of fantasy illustrating, which turned out to be "the greatest failure of all time", as the author himself describes it. A year later he sat down to it again and created a lot more refined version, not as much in the spirit of the books, as the first series were, but far closer to the general direction of fantasy art, greatly inspired by the fabulous works of Boris Vallejo and Luis Royo. This remake, later called The Passion for Chthon, received quite favorable comments after being published through the Web. Piers Anthony, the author of the books, wrote in his online newsletter: "His paintings are striking, including some anatomically correct ones--you know, uncastrated male nudity--and monsters and weird seeming sex." After visiting Rezo's website, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell wrote in a letter: "You have a beautiful imagination. Your colors are very soft and have a fairy-tale, magical quality to them."

But still, surrealism always remained to be the mainstream for Rezo Kaishauri. It was like love from the first sight, which gave birth to the passion of the whole lifetime. "Fantasy art is just the way I rest between the surrealistic rounds," he says, and immediately adds: "But this doesn't mean I consider the fantasy art a lesser genre, like many people wrongfully do. Nothing like that. It's just the matter of minding one's own business, I would say. I consider myself a far better surrealist, than a fantasy illustrator, therefore I'm just doing my thing. A person may not be a composer, but he may like to play a piano sometimes. That's exactly what I'm doing with the fantasy art."

Nevertheless, the art section of his website is entitled "Surreal and Fantasy Art by Rezo Kaishauri", which suggests that he has a lot more serious plans for his second passion, than he wants to admit.

Since 1997 a significant slowdown may be observed in Rezo Kaishauri's artistic career. This is caused by many different factors, but first of all by the departure of his brother. David left the country in 1997 and has been missing since that for more than five years now*, which has indeed delivered a heavy impact on Rezo, who lost not only the closest friend, but also his one and only true fan, his main audience. Also, the subsequential marriage had contributed its great share to the deceleration of Rezo's "creative engine". His wife, Tatyana, was very supportive, intelligent and passionate, but still she could not share his passion for art the way David could do. Beside all this, eventually, Rezo became absorbed with his work as a computer arts designer, and for quite a long period of time the art moved to the second position.

This is quite easy to understand. Since Rezo never considered selling the artwork as a way of earning his living, the only source of income for him was the work as a designer and color separation specialist. Working with customers, developing design projects, deepening the knowledge of the printing industry, mastering the computer software — all this required plenty of time, and there was left no room for art in his schedule. Eventually Rezo Kaishauri became a lot more known as a computer graphics designer, than an artist working in surrealistic genre. Besides, Rezo never was too close to the artistic circles — in fact, he never had any kind of exhibition so far, however strange it may sound. Although, this is no surprise for those who know him — Rezo leads a secluded life, and he's not exactly a "socialized" type of person. "I don't have neither time nor desire for social routs," he says. "I am an escapist by nature, a vampire who avoids the light of day. Shortly, I live in a shell. Probably, I will crawl out of it someday and change my way of life, but until that I feel very comfortable in this shell, and don't you even try to scrape me out of here!"

But even a vampire needs company. The feedback from the audience is just as important for Rezo, as for any other artist. This was the one and only motive for establishing his online presence, the reason behind creating this website. In Rezo's opinion, "an artist lives exactly as long as his artwork is demanded, then he simply dies as an artist." Presently Rezo tries to maintain the equilibrium, combining these two things together — work and passion. The index page of this website is divided into black and white parts and resembles a door sealed by the stylized symbol of Yin and Yang. This is no coincidence — the two parts of the symbol represent the differences and similarities of these two spheres — art and design. Rezo Kaishauri today is both artist and designer, sometimes more of the first than the second, sometimes vice versa. Both of them, Rezo the Designer and Rezo the Artist, have so much in common, but the same time they are so different — just like Yin and Yang. The line between the work and passion is so thin, that sometimes the work becomes a passion, and the passion becomes a work. For Rezo Kaishauri this is a constant process, the eternal gyre between black and white, shadow and light...

May, 2003.

*Soon after this essay was written, Rezo had a phone conversation with his brother, dissipating all the doubts about the whereabouts and health condition of the latter.