Tatiana and Her Priceless and Peerless Paintings
An Arte Agora story from the streets of Charlotte
We first noticed Tatiana’s cart, filled with beautifully drafted paintings on canvas. Her expressionist portraits were both technically adept and emotionally compelling. The work spoke to us before we even met her.
Despite the dearth of posted Arte Agora in Charlotte, NC, it was amazing to find Tatiana, a practicing Arte Agora artist in that city. If you’re new here, Arte Agora is art made, placed, or sold in the public way and Tatiana makes and sells art in public.
After my initial visual tour of the art in her cart, I was very drawn to this painting (below) and was hoping I could purchase it from her.
I located Tatiana inside a coffee shop adjacent to her cart (with the kind help of another coffee shop denizen), where she sat drawing. I was holding the hand-selected painting when I approached her, and in Russian-inflected English, she asked why I had touched it. I explained that I wanted to buy the painting, but she told me it was priceless, and not for sale.
Two days later, Dan saw her again, and this time, rather than touch any of her work, he simply handed her money and said he would like to buy some of her art. Once again, the art in her cart was off limits, but she gave an address of where to meet her in a couple of hours and said we could pick out something.
Turns out, Tatiana is pretty well known in Charlotte: the young man who pointed her out in the coffee shop; the woman I spoke to after I met Tatiana at her place and selected the two-sided piece above, who said that Tatiana had been living in the neighborhood for nearly 20 years, because she often saw Tatiana when she came to visit her grandmother; and this article Dan found from 2015 in The Charlotte Observer about Tatiana and her art, and how “she gives all of the money from the purchase of her art to the homeless community,” while she herself is unhoused.
On the corner of some public property, she lives in a tent sort of lean-to with an amazing hand-painted tri-fold cardboard “screen” that serves as the door. I did not take photos because that felt far too intrusive on her personal space. But meeting her at her spot, I also then understood why she brings her “priceless” canvases with her as she slowly makes her way through the city of Charlotte.
They go with her, so that she can safeguard them, so that the work she holds most dear is always near.
