Martin Lawrence Galleries

It is essential to Liudmila Kondakova to make people happy with her art. Her technique is very complex, and her studio looks like an alchemist’s laboratory, set up to fuse reality and a dream. However, she does not include any complicated concepts that require you to read long articles with obscure, and unfamiliar terms. Her art is simple and pleasing to the eye of the viewer but is also full of photographic details that enchant your way through a city skyline, a scene, or an object. She expects her art to be understood with the heart, from a person’s creative center. She hopes that people looking at her art will look at it with romance, light, and possibility in their hearts. She wants people to look at her art with parts of their creative spirit that can appreciate all the facets of life. Liudmila Kondakova is an iconographer of the city, and Paris is one of her favorite cities to depict in her work.

In “Café du Commerce” we see once again Liudmila Kondakova’s love for architecture and color in her favorite city. Going back to her training in Russian Iconography we notice the highly detailed Café windows, which give the artwork and enchanting otherworldly beauty. Classical café chairs in green tapestry invitingly adorn the front of the Café. The cherry blossom tree in the corner of the artwork indicates that spring is in full blossom. Unlike any other of her paintings, of Paris, in “Café Du Commerce” we see for the first time a dog patiently sitting outside the café as if he is also enjoying Spring and the simple mundane act of visiting a Parisian café. “Café du Commerce” is a 7.5 x 9 – inch hand-signed lithograph on paper created in 2008.