Satellite Voices

Moscow / Русский

Alexandra Gooch

July 26

A young artist inspired by beauty of nature

• Text by Kemal Tarba

Alexandra Gooch is a 19-year-old Moscow based artist and illustrator. She is currently working on her own illustrated album “Design of Nature”, taking inspiration, as she claims, from her own fears, nature and Dali. We caught up with Sasha to find out more.

Satellite Voices: What are you working on at the moment?
Alexandra Gooch: I am currently working on a book that will be dedicated to the beauty and power of nature and will be entitled "Design of Nature". The book's title was inspired by the emerging capitalism in our country, so relevant notion of design and its comprehensive strength. In this context, I want to draw people's attention to nature, to what surrounds them. Using the example of the beauty of exotic birds, I want to show that nature – is the best and the greatest artist, creator, builder, sculptor, and so on.

This book will also serve as a sort of "decoding" of my work, a pointer to what exactly inspires me, what areas and recesses of nature lured me most, and how they are sublimated in my work. Drawing only parts of the birds is a symbolic call to preserve nature in full (most of the animals will be taken from the Red Book).

SV: What's the best thing about living in Moscow?
Alexandra Gooch: I probably will not be able to answer this question because my life rhyme is not corresponding - I almost always live out of town. But one thing I can say for sure: the cultural heritage of Moscow and Russia as a whole can’t help attract and interest.

SV: What's the best advice you've ever been given?
Alexandra Gooch: It is difficult to remember a single, very catchy advice I’ve ever been given. Perhaps the best advice I got from the book of Nietzsche's – “Zarathustra declared: What falleth, that shall one also push!”

SV: What are your hopes for the future?
Alexandra Gooch: I would really like to draw, because, in my opinion, the ink does not disclose all my emotions in full force. I want to draw so that each of my work, each canvas would possess such energy and force. it would be enough for someone to look at the picture and it would make him want to cry, and it will burn inside, burn so hard that after this he will lack stomach, and just like in his youthful days he will fall in love and immediately cease to love, and will at the same time be infinitely painful and pleasant. Only in such cases may I claim a force and dynamism can be equal to music. That it has the same energy. I have metaphors, images, but yet I have no power for their full birth and implementation. My fears are, perhaps, the future rudiments of my work, stuff for new thinking, the ability to open up all that was different, to express it all from different perspective, to lift my fears into the ranks of gods and higher ideals.