Eteri Chkadua-Tuite, a 25-year-old painter from Soviet Georgia, knows at least one difference between Americans and Georgians: the way they express their emotions. Georgians, she says, “show it in their eyes and their brows,” but not Americans: “My husband is an American, and you can never tell what he wants by his expression. With Georgians you can tell every little moment.”
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Since her marriage three years ago to a Chicagoan, Chkadua-Tuite has divided her time between Chicago and her hometown of Tbilisi. In both cities she spends her time observing people–on trains, in the streets, in stores. Then she tries to paint what she sees. Her first one-woman show is on display this month at the Maya Polsky Gallery on Superior.
But a few years into the program (which took her seven years to complete), she got tired of her irrational, slapdash approach. So she began to sketch before starting to paint. Gradually, her work became more detailed and realistic. Eventually she got to the point where she couldn’t paint without a detailed preliminary sketch that laid out precise lines and shadows. Her obsession with detail meant she had to study real faces closely to duplicate them in her paintings.
The more she paints, the more complex her work becomes: more faces, more to see in the faces, more going on behind the faces. She often spends months on a painting now; the last time her work was exhibited (at a group show in Chicago in January), she was at the gallery the afternoon the show opened, putting finishing touches on a painting.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Loren Santow.
