So, I decided today was the day to finally try and get a handle on this Elena Panova stuff. I’d seen the name pop up here and there, and you know how it is, curiosity gets the better of you. Figured I’d just spend a bit of time, get a general idea of her work, what she’s all about. Easy peasy, or so I thought.
Fired up the old machine, you know, the usual routine. Typed “Elena Panova” into the search bar and hit enter. First page of results, okay, some interesting images. But then, as I clicked around, things started to get a bit… messy. I was seeing different styles, different subjects. Honestly, it felt like I was looking at the work of three or four different artists, not one. One minute it’s this, the next it’s something completely different. A bit of a head-scratcher, really.
I spent a good hour, maybe more, just sifting through images, trying to find some kind of common thread. You look for that consistent line, that particular way of using color, that something that tells you, “Ah, yes, that’s her.” But it was like trying to pick out one specific grain of sand on a whole beach. Frustrating, to say the least. I made a few notes, saved a couple of images that seemed to sort of, maybe, belong to the same person, but I wasn’t convinced.
It’s funny, this whole process, digging around, trying to make sense of bits and pieces, it really threw me back to when I was a kid. I remember I got this super complex model car kit for my birthday. Must have been hundreds of tiny plastic parts. The instruction sheet? Might as well have been written in ancient hieroglyphics. The pictures were tiny and blurry, and half the numbers didn’t seem to match the parts.
I sat at the kitchen table for what felt like days, surrounded by all these little bits of grey plastic. I’d try to stick part A to part B, and then the whole thing would fall apart, or I’d glue my fingers together. My old man would walk by, see me fuming, and he’d just chuckle and say something like, “The challenge is half the fun, son!” Yeah, easy for him to say, he wasn’t the one with a model car that looked more like a modern art sculpture gone wrong. I think I eventually gave up and just played with the wheels.
And that’s kind of how I felt looking into Elena Panova today. Got all these pieces, these images, but the big picture? Still pretty fuzzy. Maybe she’s just one of those artists who likes to experiment a lot, or maybe the internet is just a jumble of misattributed stuff. Who knows? It’s like trying to assemble IKEA furniture with half the instructions missing and a couple of extra screws you don’t know what to do with.
So, yeah, that was my “practice” for the day. Not sure I learned a whole lot about Elena Panova definitively, but I definitely flexed my patience muscles. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try a different approach, or just look at pictures of cats. At least with cats, you know what you’re getting.
