Tag Archives: Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins

Kaliningrad a Green City

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 65 [23 May 2020] ~ Trenches & Trees

Revised 1 May 2025 | First published 23 May 2020 – Kaliningrad a Green City

Apprehensive that May may not be the merry, merry month that it is cracked up to be? Put your memory in reverse gear and trip back to the coronavirus spring of 2020. I cannot guarantee that things can only get better. I cannot guarantee that they could hardly be worse. But, relatively speaking … {This post originally published May 2020 | Revised 2 May 2025}

Unlike in the UK at present, there is no sudden uplift in the weather; nothing to tempt and entice one to cast caution to the wind, ignore the restrictions and warnings and go wassailing off for a day at the coast. It is true that in the past few days Kaliningrad has been granted a nominal hike in temperature, pushing it up to 15 degrees, and this long-awaited blessing combined with a light but still fresh breeze in association with Mr Blue Sky and a sun that has condescended to at last come out from behind the clouds, were sufficiently alluring to prise myself from self-isolation for the novel pleasure of stretching my legs.

To effect our home exit strategy, we first had to run the gauntlet of passing without mishap from our garden to the road beyond. For the past three weeks or more, our house, and those around us, have been subject to ‘trench warfare’.

**The Trenchmen cometh … I can’t help thinking that we would have been better laying that new block paving later …**

Cable-laying has been going on. A narrow but deep trench, hazardous enough to dislocate or break something vital should a miscalculated step occur, dissects the pavement at the front of our property and, running at right angles to it, extends along the neighbours’ boundary to the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, behind which, you might care to know, sits a very large dog.

From the vantage point of my bedroom window, I have been able to observe (intermittently, you understand, as self-isolation has not left me wanting in occupations of an interesting kind), this cable work in progress and mentally bookmark whilst doing so the differences that might exist between how a job of this nature is handled in Kaliningrad compared with similar tasks undertaken in the UK.

From the outset, and for most of the initial period of work, the workforce has consisted of three lads and a young woman, armed with two spades, two shovels and the indispensable trusty wheelbarrow. The blokes have been doing most of the digging, whilst the young woman, with her workman’s gloves neatly folded and tucked to dangle professionally from her jeans’ back pocket, appears to have had an overseeing role, an inference later corroborated when a clipboard suddenly sprung into her hand. Praise where praise is due, however: at one stage in the laborious game, she, too, rolled up her sleeves and took a turn on the shovel.

Weather conditions ~ cold and raining ~ have been generally unsympathetic, hardly conducive to the job in hand, but this small group of sappers, equipped with nothing more mechanical than the arms that God has given them, unless you include the wheelbarrow, struggled valiantly on alone until, after a week’s hiatus, the cavalry arrived.

The reinforcements are a hardy bunch of chaps, not only are they seasoned trenchers but also capable cable layers. The cables they are laying had been deposited along with piles of aggregate prior to their arrival. They now reside on the oval island, a compelling grass-covered landmark at the centre of confluent streets, which marks the spot of a German bunker constructed in World War Two.

The temptation at this juncture to go off on a historic tangent and waffle on about the many wartime installations surviving in Kaliningrad and across its Prussian region is difficult to resist, but as global tourism has some way to go before it can get back on its feet from the damage done by coronavirus, I will wait for a more propitious moment to elaborate on this and continue for the present with my narrative.

Kaliningrad a Green City

We had crossed the trench in front of the house and this delicate feat accomplished were now walking along, as if coronavirus was not our shadow, the original cobbled streets that once were Königsberg. Victor Ryabinin, the artist and historian, had assured us that ‘green’ Königsberg was essentially a myth. Königsberg, he said, at least the oldest parts of the city, never had been green.

The streets were narrow, the buildings high and the order of the day had been red brick and grey cobbles. The city’s outlying districts, those laid down in the early years of the 20^th century and expanded in the 1920s through to the mid-1930s, had been designed with green in mind. The houses and plots on which they stand have their English equivalent in the UK’s 1920s’ suburbs, whose properties sold on the back of the clever and catchy advertising slogan, ‘A country home in the city’, or words to that effect.

Every home in Britain’s new suburbs came complete with a small front garden and a larger plot at the rear, and on the wide and curving streets where these airy houses stood, a row of trees lined either side, augmented, where space allowed, with narrow but neat grass verges, demarcating pavement from road and bringing a little more green into the urban environment.

In Königsberg’s equivalent districts, as contemporary photographs and postcards show, though most new streets of the day were tree-lined like their English counterparts, such trees as there were, were, of course, but saplings, which doubtlessly formed visually graceful vistas but with nothing like the leafy foliage that adorn those self-same streets today, now that these trees, like me, have reached maturity.

You see, what happens to you when you subject yourself to self-isolation: every simple detail, every once commonplace thing, every taken-for-granted and overlooked minutiae undergoes a process of scrutinised amplification, so acutely rendered to senses locked away indoors that before you can wryly say ‘I believe in coronavirus’, you cannot see the wood for the trees — or, in my particular case, the trees for Kaliningrad’s leaves.

Should old acquaintance be forgot

Our leafy walk through Kaliningrad’s suburbs, along the canopied tree-lined streets with their flower and foliate burgeoning gardens, had brought us after a while within viewing distance of a most eccentric sight — that peculiar waterside café, that semi-abandoned confection, which, with its facsimile rooftop lighthouse, Captain Ahab perched on the balcony doing I don’t know what and a lot of marine-like crustaceans daubed upon the walls, resembles something that sneaked into Russia during the 1970s from an amusement park in Skegness.

Cafe near pond in Kaliningrad now in 2025 demolished

I have seen postcard photographs of the building that stood here in earlier times. Admittedly, it, as with the pond and everything around it, was saturated monochrome — obviously in the 1910s the world was waiting for colour — but even in this black and white existence (things used to be black and white before coronavirus was invented) the former Königsberg building had all the ennobling features that Gothicity could bestow and was, in its waterside setting, a proverbial sight for sore eyes rather than an eyesore for eyes reduced by its sight to tears, which, omitting novelty out of context, is as good as it gets today. [Note, although Captain Ahab went down with his ship two years after this photo was taken, the demolition pirates have failed to launch their own version, which stands as forlorn and half-built in a spot which Heaven reserved for a restaurant, but which seems to have become Kaliningrad’s ghost ship graveyard.]

Kaliningrad a Green City

Passing quickly by this ‘thing’, which in spite of my reaction I have a sneaky affection for, we wended our way, notwithstanding, happier now that it was behind us, along the block-paved path that runs around the pond’s perimeter.

Old photographs demonstrate that on both sides of the lake (my apologies purists, I know I should say ‘pond’, but ponds are so small in England and Königsberg’s ponds so large that the appelation seems incongruous) the banks had, for the most part, been left to their own devices, accumulating vegetation and fringed throughout with wetland trees. In the black and white world of old photography atmosphere reigns supreme, but detail can in time, and as a result of time, often call for magnification. I had thus to resort to a lens to pick out from these old photographs the presence of a narrow winding path, most probably gravel surfaced, curling in the early 1900s, through the ribbon of trees and foliage skirting the edge of the pond.

Subsequently lost, this beaten track is now hard paved and in a character and colours favoured by, and thus typical of, 21^st century urban planners. Much of the original foliage, by that I mean the wild and natural, has long since been dug out, substituted with mown grass lawns and carefully tended municipal flowerbeds. But whilst block paving of every kind, in all its imaginative shapes, its patterns and its sizes, along with children’s’ play parks, public lavs, a skateboard space and even an exercise quadrangle, has colonised the past, the Königsberg trees that form a boundary along the side of the adjacent road and the odd gnarled or venerable specimen dotted amongst the later additions, some Soviet others millennial, endorse the attribution that Kaliningrad unlike Königsberg is as green a city as a city can get.

As much as I was enjoying and being overly distracted by that which I am phenomenally good at — daydreaming — today had its objectives, and this meant putting my dreams on hold and focusing for a moment on finding a wall with graffiti on it. Not that this endeavour would prove difficult in Kaliningrad. Graffiti is just one, sadly, of a number of contagious viruses that has made its way from the West.

Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins in Kaliningrad — **Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins and Nadezhda Rumyantseva in Kaliningrad**

The graffiti we were looking for was not one of your run-of-the-mill, deface, vandalise, spoil, degrade and then talk it up as ‘urban art’ jobs. It was truly an original piece, a bona fide work of art, featuring the actor Anthony Hopkins in his role as Hannibal Lecter and the Russian actress, Nadezhda Rumyantseva, star of The Girls, a classic Soviet romantic-comedy drama — but more of that on another occasion. We found what we were looking for, and my wife made good with the camera.

Kaliningrad: Not all graffiti is equal — **There is graffiti and graffiti …**

Work of an anonymous but talented Kaliningrad artist — **Mine’s a vegetarian**

And then she said, For old times’ sake.” What could she be suggesting?

She wanted us to walk closer to the lake, taking in Flame restaurant as we did so. The ‘old times sake’ referred to recent history, but a recent history which in the New Normal was as lost to the world as dinosaurs. Ah, those glorious days — so happy and carefree — when we would walk to Flame on an afternoon or stroll down on an evening for a meal and a pint of brew. What had become of those days? More to the point, will they ever return?

Like every other bar, Flame was a victim of coronavirus. There it stood, shrouded in darkness, doors barred, patronless and yet for all this desertion not quite extinguished. A nice and reassuring touch was that in keeping with its tradition, Flame, though closed to the public, continued to project music into and across the surrounding recreation area via external hi-fi speakers stationed on its alfresco forecourt. In these grim and troubled times, the music struck a chord that resonated inside one’s soul. It was the bittersweet sound of the band playing on as the Titanic hit the watery skids.

Now that the shops — some of the shops — had officially opened their doors again, we had a small chore to fulfil, which was to buy a part for the vacuum cleaner. We might fall foul of coronavirus and die as a result, but heaven forbid we would do such a thing in a house with a mucky carpet.

As we crossed the road from the pond, emerging at the side of Flame, it was evident that whilst we had been hibernating Kaliningrad’s construction workers had been doing no such thing. The shopping centre that has been taking shape at the end of the city market had gone, in the space of days, from a shell of incomplete concrete pieces into an impressive three- or four-storey series of ascending profiled platforms.

Ordinarily, way back when in the Old (and familiar) Normal, something as mundane as this seen on a day-to-day basis would have excited little more than a passing glance, but incarceration, self-imposed or otherwise, seems to have the tendency to sharpen the edge of the mind, so much so in my case that in regarding this evolving building, its Phoenix-like transformation, I felt a kindred spirit in Rip Van Winkle, or rather an affinity with the bemusement he had felt on waking from a sleep of hitherto unknown proportion.

Vacuum cleaner part in pocket, we set off on our homeward journey, not by retracing our steps — having to pass Flame again now that it was clam-tight shut would be more than the drinker in me could withstand — but with a view towards returning on the opposite side of the pond. This route would necessitate, however, walking past yet another well-frequented, landmark bar: the one in historic Rossgarten Gate — CLOSED … just like the rest!

Fortunately, by way of profound distraction, on the opposite side of the road, in one of Kaliningrad’s public squares, I saw a man with his hose in his hand. He was leaning nonchalantly from his truck, playing his hose in the sun over some of the city’s prettiest flower beds. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “It’s not only the bars that are dry.”

Watering the flowers in the green city of Kaliningrad — **A lovely day on which to have your hose out**

Kaliningrad a Green City

Our walk back around the lake had proven itself a pleasant detour. There is only so much of novelty to be found in strolling back and forth days and weeks upon end from your kitchen to the living room, and, let’s be honest about it, the water features of bath and bog, though unarguably indispensable, hardly compete or come close to the natural scenerific beauty imparted by rippling pond under a clear blue sky.

On this side of the pond as upon the other, trees in abundance abide, and in such variety and of such different ages that they did not have to ask me twice to indulge my obsessive passion for retrospective reverie, inviting me to determine which of them had been planted during Kaliningrad’s Soviet era and which belonged to Königsberg. I suppose you’d do the same if you were me.

The wise old trees of Königsberg-Kaliningrad

Trees, ponds, brand-new shopping centres rising up from out of the ground like mysterious midnight mushrooms, bars with no people inside them, sepia memories of long ago, men with their hoses dangling quaintly out of civic truck windows, a light breeze, a blue sky and off to the shop to buy some tomatoes. Very nearly and almost back home; just the trenches to cross.

Kaliningrad Artist El Kartoon

Let’s face it and the cost of fast food ~ Limitations and Silence by Kaliningrad artist El Kartoon

Updated: 4 October 2021 | first published: 28 July 2020

In my blog post of 9 November 2019 I wrote about an unusual art exhibition we had attended and how we had been seduced by a particular artist’s work. A couple of months ago, a number of artworks by this artist were up for grabs.

The artist, anonymous artist (nom de guerre El Kartoon) had placed a number of his works for sale on the internet and was about to advertise them via Facebook. However, before the works were posted on Facebook the exhibition organiser, recalling our interest in the artist’s work, emailed my wife, Olga, to ascertain if we were in the market for any of the pieces he was selling, particularly the half-face painted on metal substrate, as we had expressed an interest specifically in this item, together with another composition featuring Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).

For a while, we ummed and ahhhed, as you do; Olga weighing up the cost of the paintings against the number of plants she could buy for the garden, and me, mentally converting the cost of the paintings into foaming glasses of ale. Eventually, we decided to compromise.

The painting we bought was that of the female face, or rather half a female face, painted not on board or canvas but on a sheet of rusty metal.

The painting in question, Limitations, certainly has an innate power. When I beheld it unwrapped and standing in the lobby at the foot of our attic steps I experienced an overwhelming and incisive sense of awe, which rapidly transmuted, becoming first privilege and then disbelief that we now actually owned this fascinating composition.

The artistic arrangement is simple but effective. The face has been painted on a metal sheet. The sheet is old and rusting. It has a turned edge on one side, suggesting that in a previous life it had an industrial-mechanical purpose.

The face is female and comprises exactly 50% of a full human face, the invisible proportion achieved by positioning the image on the extreme left hand-side of the substrate. Both the location of the image and the facial expression lends itself to the interpretation of peering anxiously out from behind something, in the way, for example, you might steal a glance from behind a half-opened door. The remaining portion of the metal base, approximately one-third, has been left untreated ~ rusting and tarnished.

El Kartoon ‘Be Seeing You!’ in our attic

I have suggested that the expression on the face betrays a sense of anxiety, to that can be added apprehension. The looker is uneasy, vulnerable. The one eye, brilliant blue, reflects something white and rectangular. The blue of the eye is as deep and beautiful as it is insistent; the glazed reflection upon its surface (could it be a window?) stares out at you above the dark well of the pupil, drawing you into its mystery.

Everything in the composition of the face itself, the broad, black serrated outline, the layers that form the contours of the face and the fine details, are jagged, frayed, fragmenting. There is nothing calm, nothing quiescent. Whatever it is that informs the expression, it is as unnerved as it is unnerving.

In this work, as in most of the artist’s works that we have seen, a striking and, I am inclined to believe, essential engine of the thematic enigma resides in the application of a curious overlay of geometrical lines. In this example, those lines are fainter than in his other creations and do not extend so definitely from the painting’s centrality into the outlying images or borders, but they are there ~ on the exposed and rusting metal and among the drizzle and daubed discolouration, the latter looking like natural erosion, perhaps from water exposure, as if, along with the fading black paint to one corner, they belong to the metal’s former existence, to its pre-artistic, functional and then discarded history.

To the beholder, these lines are key. They, above anything else, if there is, indeed, anything else, help to unlock all manner of ambivalence. But one is a constant, and that is that the lines emphasise connectivity ~ the inescapable interconnection between the realm of flesh and emotion and the hard, unyielding, material world to which, no matter how unforgiving it is, we are all hardwired.

Taken together with other paintings by the same artist in which this technique is employed, I am inclined to understand these lines to be not just an overlay on an overwhelmed human face extending outwards and then back again into and from the physical world but the circuit board of modern life, which speaks to us not just of hard engineering but in the technological idiom by which our life is controlled and defined ~ the ultimate interconnectivity from which there is no escape, at least not for us in our flesh and blood lifetime.

Given the nature of this unusual painting and its more than flirtatious relationship with negativity, I was surprised that it somehow fitted into Olga’s reality of butterflies, trees and flowers, but the mystery was made known to me when after voicing my confusion she declared simply that she did not find the composition unnerving. ‘Vulnerable’, yes; ‘unnerving, no’. Had she really failed to discern the connection between our vulnerability in this world ~ the world that others have created for us ~ and how this might be ~ indeed cannot be, anything else but unnerving?

I was pleased, however, that her second choice as to where to hang the painting, which was the kitchen, was discounted fairly quickly, not on the basis of my interpretation but, whilst she would not see the picture as often as she liked, on the wall at the bottom of the attic steps, which seemed to be the place for it. We agreed on this. It fitted perfectly. It was where it would have most impact without impacting mostly.

Anthony Hopkins

Since learning that Mr Anonymous’ paintings were on the market for prices we could afford, we had been arguing the toss as to whether we should buy another of this gentleman’s artworks, the one based on Anthony Hopkins’ fictional character, Hannibal Lecter, in The Silence of the Lambs.

El Kartoon's 'Silence' artwork — El Kartoon’s ‘Silence’ as seen at the 2019 art exhibition, Kaliningrad

We had negotiated a price for this second artwork provided we bought both, ie the half-face, Limitations, and Silence as well, and had just about talked ourselves out of it when our inquiries as to why there was a near identical painting masquerading as graffiti on a small brick utility building opposite Kaliningrad’s lake met with an interesting answer: apparently, the artist had been caught subjecting the aforesaid building to his aesthetic skills, had been summarily arrested and thereafter charged with vandalism. The case had gone to court but in conclusion had been dismissed*.

Kaliningrad artist El Kartoon — El Kartoon’s open-air work, sadly, since defaced*

*Note that this public stencil was painted over sometime in 2021 🤔

The artist’s compulsion to reproduce his painting as ~ ahem ~ an ‘urban art form’ had arisen, we were told, out of twin noble sentiments: a sense of civic duty and moral obligation. He had disposed the image where he did as a warning to young ladies who, reportedly, were apt to congregate there after dark to eat the stuff they had bought from a certain US fast-food chain nearby. The artist wished to say, ‘look out there are predators about’ and was not necessarily commenting on the quality, or perhaps the content, of what it was they were eating or who, in fact, they were buying it from.

The framed artwork has an interesting historical annotation attached to it in that it still bears the official tag it was given as a possible ‘exhibit’ in a court of law!

Bugger! We had to have it!

Olga beamed with delight when I suggested that she get on the blower right away and tell the lady in charge of the art exhibitions that we had decided to take it if the artist was prepared to wait for payment at the end of the month. She, the lady, opined that it was a matter of fate that we would buy both as we had expressed such interest in them when first we saw them at the exhibition. Like Olga she believed that we were meant to own them. And I believe they were meant to own us.

El Kartoon’s ‘Silence’ displayed in our attic

Further information on the artist and artist’s work:

A comment from my wife, Olga, on her Facebook account
Mick and I bought these artworks just because we like the feel and amplitude. They call the artist the Russian Bansky, because of his distinctive stencilling technique. His works have been featured on the streets of Kaliningrad. I wonder if he will sell the copyright? When he is as famous as Bansky (and I believe he will become so one day, as he has talent), his public ‘installations’ might be sold by removing the walls they were painted on!

Notes from the art exhibitor’s website [link no longer active as at 12/04/2022] Art Space Gallery
El Kartoon, artist
The main direction [of his work] is stencil graphics aspiring to painting. The works reflect the desire to reflect fundamental values, feelings and social problems through the prism of our digital age. Contemporary, about contemporaries, for contemporaries.

El Kartoon
And now in Russian …
Основное направление – трафаретная графика стремящаяся к живописи. В работах отражено стремление отразить некие фундаментальные ценности, ощущения, социальные проблемы сквозь призму нашей цифровой эпохи.Эта живопись – отражающая современников, о соврем…

El Kartoon
EL Kartoon начал рисовать граффити в 1998 году. С 2002 по 2009 год был творческий перерыв. С 2009 года работает в трафаретной технике.Единственный Российский художник, который представляет трафаретную графику на международной арене, в частности на крупнейшей международной выставке трафаретного искусства Stencil Art Prize, Sidney, Australia, а так же является участником The Kutz, Bristol, United Kingdom

О работе «Молчание…»

Причиной создания работы послужило случайное наблюдение за ночными “обитателями” парковки, которые в ночное время едят там Макдональдс.В процессе создания картины на стене близлежащего здания автор был арестован и доставлен в отдел милиции. Часы, которые должны были показывать время – 18:00, сделать не получилось, но благодаря этому работа получила “новую окраску” и новый смысл.

O работе” Limitations”

Металл – это ассоциация художника с окружающим миром. В работе “Limitations”- человек в какой то степени заперт, в какой-то степени ограничен. Эта работа является одной из серии уличных работ на тему “цифрового человека” – современного, технологичного, оцифрованного и запущенного в сеть, в тираж, и как автору казалось в процессе над работой – это время наступает стремительно. Недавние законы, принятые в Москве, подтверждают “теорию цифрового человека”.

And now in English …
El Kartoon
The only Russian artist who represents stencil graphics in the international arena, in particular at the largest international exhibition of Stencil Art, Sidney, Australia. He also participated in The Kutz Exhibition, Bristol, United Kingdom.

About the artwork Silence
Silence came from the accidental observation of the night ‘inhabitants’ ~ the young who congregate in the parking area close to McDonald’s to consume the food they purchase from the fast-food chain.

In the process of the creating the stencilled work on the side of a building close to the parking area, the artist was arrested and taken to the police department. The clock, which was supposed to show the time, 18:00, was not finished, but thanks to this unfinished touch, the work received a ‘new colour’ and a new meaning.

About the artwork Limitations
El Kartoon writes: “Metal is my association with the outside world. In this case, the subject is locked to some extent, to some extent limited …”

Limitations was a series of street works on the topic of ‘digital man’ ~ modern, technological, digitised and launched into the network, in circulation and so on. At the time when the work was being created, it seemed to the artist that the time of the ‘digital man’ was rapidly approaching. Recent laws adopted in Moscow suggest to the artist that the time of the ‘digital man’ has come.