Margarita Kuznetsova found a more creative direction. After her mother, a ballet teacher, gently suggested that she might be better at painting than pirouetting, Kuznetsova turned to creating artworks with ballet as the central theme.
"I wanted to dance, and the way I could do this was through art," said Kuznetsova.
Specializing in sculpture, Kuznetsova graduated from St. Petersburg's Repin Institute. But she soon found that there was hardly a market for statuary. The models she had made for statues of Anna Pavlova remained on the shelf.
To survive, Kuznetsova, 30, and her husband, who is also a sculptor, turned to painting.
In the summer, they sell their works from the bluffs of Svir Stroy, a forest stop on Volga River cruise itineraries about 140 miles east of St. Petersburg. And recently Kuznetsova began selling her work in the ballet shop on Ulitsa Petrovka, just behind the Bolshoi Theater.
The small pictures, primarily in watercolors and pastels, offer an album of ballet's beloved heroines -- Nikia in her death dance from "La Bayad?re," Giselle in the mad scene, the Dying Swan in her final moments of life. There are choruses of swans, sylphs in flight. Folk dancers and gypsies spin with abandon.
The artist frequently uses as a model her sister Larisa, a professional dancer in a folk-dance troupe. Other images are created from observation backstage at the Mariinsky.
Some of Kuznetsova's works are accomplished variations on Degas' famous ballerinas, while others are reminiscent of the style of Russia's best-known dance portraitist, Valery Kosorukov, who now lives in the United States. Kuznetsova considers the two her teachers as she makes the transition from sculpture to canvas. The mixing and use of color is a particular challenge, she said.
Searching for her own style, Kuznetsova balances on the edge of greeting-card sweetness with some works, while others tend toward angularity and abstraction. "Degas looked at ballet like a landscape painter. The canvases are somewhat passive, the figures a little plump," Kuznetsova said.
"But ballet has changed. Dancers can be very angular -- minimum mass, minimal bodies, more complex technique. The important thing is to show the body and its movement, removing the 'architectural excess.'"
Her latest works include studies of dancers at practice -- sharply drawn silhouettes against vividly contrasting backgrounds. "I like these rehearsals more than anything, because it's pure movement," Kuznetsova said, "and from the movement the image is born."
The paintings, ranging from $15 to $85, are helping Kuznetsova and her husband to build a house and workshop on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.
In the future, Kuznetsova hopes to paint and sculpt on religious themes, perhaps adorning the inside of a church. "In my ballet pictures, I try to portray bodily beauty," said Kuznetsova, "but I also want to express spiritual beauty."
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