My name is Nina Kolchitskaya.
I am a painter and photographer from Russia,
and I have been living in Paris for about ten years.
I traveled a lot when I was a kid.
I lived in Russia until I was nine,
and then in Asia, in Laos for four years,
and then in Milan, Italy.
My boyfriend and I were together for two years.
We each have a child, and we needed to find a bigger apartment
where we could all be together, not just once in a while,
but all the time.
We viewed a lot of places and nothing was right for us.
We were giving up.
Then a friend of ours called us and said,
"I really think this one is for you. I think you're going to love it".
And yes, we totally and immediately fell in love with this place.
We are in my living room.
We built it gradually with Olivier.
We've been living here for three years.
I like the idea that each piece of furniture, each object
represents something personal
and that reminds us of a trip or an important memory,
like this carpet that I brought back from a trip to Morocco.
Olivier took care of more imposing things like the sofa or this table from the '60s.
And I took care of books, vases and flowers.
For example, we brought these vases back from our first trip to Morocco.
It was our first trip as a couple.
Olivier built this vinyl console table all by himself.
It is an important item in our house.
I brought this pebble back from Normandy.
I picked it up at the beach with my son.
This is one of my first paintings.
It was a series called "Left-handed lovers".
I used to draw faces and little poems with my left hand,
the hand of the heart, even though I'm right-handed.
I did that to transcribe with rather clumsy and trembling lines
this fragility of burgeoning feelings and feelings of love.
It's a kind of laying bare, even in the flaws,
because the drawings were often a bit messed up.
I exhibited my drawings for the first time, so it was an important moment.
The story of this Togo is very funny
because Olivier always wanted to have one,
and I always refused because I didn't like it at all.
In the end, he was right, because I think it's really cool
and it fits very well in the room.
It's very comfortable.
It's part of our successful couple's compromises
to arrange our living room.
We keep our tree until Russian Christmas.
I like to decorate it with my son.
He always makes very personalized decorations.
It's a lion.
Olivier has a music studio right next to the house,
so he often works there.
I insisted that we have a piano at home, because I like it very much when he plays.
And my son is passionate too, so he practices.
I think it's very important,
especially when you have a musician in the family,
to have music in the house, lively.
This painting was part of my exhibition last year,
which I called "Faces and Dreams".
It was a series that I painted on old pages of old books,
with poems next to them, which illustrated them.
It was the last one I kept for myself.
Painting has always been there.
My parents are painters and filmmakers, and my sister paints too.
My grandparents were actors in theater.
I was brought up in this world.
At the beginning, I drew and painted for myself, in secret,
and I was doing photography.
Then, maybe five years ago, I reversed the roles
and decided to show my drawings and paintings a little more,
thanks to my boyfriend who was telling me that it was good,
that I shouldn't hide them, that it was important to show them.
From then on, I really reversed.
I showed my paintings and drawings more than my photos.
For me, words are sometimes a weapon of war and love.
They are of infinite power.
My books are really my greatest treasure, after my family, of course.
I have lots of books in Russian too.
A Russian poet autographed this book for my grandmother.
I was very happy I could keep it.
They are often children's poems, about watermelon, for example.
I love old books because every page has lived, every page has been loved and has traveled too.
A book is also a rather fascinating object.
It's a fig tree that we bought from a flower shop next to Olivier's old apartment.
It was very small when we bought it.
It grew up because it received a lot of love, and especially light,
because there is a lot of light here, so it is very happy.
When I was a kid, in Russia,
we had a country house with a big vegetable garden
and lots of flowers everywhere.
I cultivated them with my grandmother and my father.
I think that's where my passion for plants comes from.
What was quite incredible when we first viewed this apartment
was precisely this kind of balcony terrace that runs along the entire apartment.
Since we are on the top floor, we really feel like we are in the sky.
It's quite amazing.
So I took the opportunity to plant a lot of different varieties of plants
and fruits.
I have strawberries in summer, figs, lemons, lots of flowers.
I tried to make sure that the garden stays green all year long.
Some plants lose their leaves, but many of them keep their leaves,
and they all bloom at different times of the year,
which is quite nice.
When we moved in,
we could immediately picture children upstairs.
Here, it was a room that was a bit like an office that didn't make much sense,
and so we immediately thought it would be nice to have my workshop
with all my charms, my poetry books,
and to be able to draw all the time, even in the evening or at night,
when everyone is asleep, is quite nice.
This is my very personal space, a bit like a small cave
with lots of treasures that I always keep next to me to paint.
I love small objects.
I love being able to touch them, put them in my pocket
and carry them with me.
There are many things.
There is a picture of my boyfriend, little dolls dancing,
mini frames, drawings of my son.
For me, it's very important to be surrounded by all these little things when I'm working.
Rilke is my favorite poet.
And my favorite writer in the whole world is Giono,
especially his first novel called "Colline", which makes me cry every time.
It's amazing.
Here, I really only have my works on paper,
which I paint with watercolors on sheets of old books,
often poems.
I feel as if they already have a story in them,
to which I add new and instinctive features.
It's a combination that I like.
Moreover, it gives a rather special color to my paintings,
which are each time a bit of surprises that I discover while painting,
because as the sheets all have quite different colors,
I don't know what will happen once I paint on them.
I like this surprise too.
This is a dream I had this summer for two weeks non-stop,
that I couldn't get out of my head.
So one day I painted it.
There was a scarf with birds on it that was put on my shoulders to save me.
I painted that scarf and I finally stopped having the dream.
This was my first big painting.
It's not completely finished, but I don't want to touch it
because I feel like I might ruin it.
And in the end, it's again a bit like a never-ending dream,
not always fully explained.
There are pencil strokes, lemons that come out of nowhere,
and a sort of face that appears in a multitude of colored clouds.
It was my first big work, and I like it.
In the beginning, I did very small sizes.
I needed to sit down,
and I didn't necessarily need more space or more light,
so it was very convenient.
At one point I had to make it bigger,
and I also wanted to escape a bit further than in another room.
So, I was lucky enough to have a workshop elsewhere,
to have a fresher and newer mind.
Here, we are in a hotel which is empty at the moment,
and where I have a room.
It's a place dedicated to all my acrylic and large format paintings,
whereas I keep at home my watercolors and all the smaller works on paper,
which require less brain escape at the moment.
The bird was my second large painting.
It can be interpreted quite freely.
It was a dream again.
So, I put all the elements of my dream.
We can also imagine that it is a planet, and that the bird is in the sky.
They are all my flowers.
They are some kind of naive still lifes
that symbolize, at the moment I paint them, my state of mind and my life.
Even if they are still lifes, they are very much alive.
I very often work with music.
A few years ago, there was a moment when I saw music,
it's very strange, but I saw colors that moved according to the music.
I try to transcribe that when I paint.
There's always a lot of music around me.
It appears as flowers, but deep down, for me,
all these colors and features are personifications of the music.
Sometimes, in some paintings,
there are allusions to the small objects that I have at home, the little fish,
the lemons and the flowers that fall out.
When I go to work, I like to dress like I'm going to dinner,
or like I'm going to do something important.
And one day I was told I was coming out.
It felt like my outfits were coming out of my paintings.
It's nice, because it means I'm trying
to really capture everything I am in my paintings, so it's cool.
I have a friend who knows me very well and who told me that I'm a mixed garden.
Sometimes full of colors, and then, all of a sudden,
a very simple outfit, jeans and tee-shirt and that's fine too.
But both of them represent me a lot.
To be inspired, it is important for me to have lots of reminders of who I am,
of what my dreams are, around me.
Clothes might be a bit of that too.
I feel my outfit when I wear it.
It's part of what inspires me.