Commentary from Jonathan Waterlow
Image 10
These notebook pages bring together several images and themes which characterise so much of Azazello’s sketch work. We see a resplendent sun burning at the top of the left-hand page, an image which appears throughout his work as a talisman of sorts – a hopeful symbol usually accompanied by words and drawings more positive in tone than many of his other pieces. This fits not only with the hippie milieu’s general celebration of the sun alongside blossoming flowers, but also with Azazello’s personal experiences: he seems to have been acutely affected by the changing seasons, finding himself intensely depressed during the winter months. This is reflected in his drawings, notes, and his poetry. When a new year begins, we find Azazello urging on the spring, willing summer into existence, and beginning to find fresh hope and energy for life which so often seemed to desert him during the cold winter months. He also suffered from insomnia, so the daylight hours were especially precious to him – hence we find a short note on this page which reads, ‘and at night, beneath the moon, I have no rest [or peace]’.
The sun here appears as though in the mind of a flaming-eyebrowed face, which gazes up into the sky. His face overlaps and partly incorporates another – a common artistic convention of Azazello’s, which hints at the mixture of different impulses or selves he perhaps felt in himself, or perhaps a harmony he (and other hippies) believed or hoped to exist between all people. A curious building also appears here, next to a disproportionate candelabra. Both these items, along with the speeding horse-drawn cart travelling away from the building and the fencing swordsman on the opposite page, are part of Azazello’s obsession with medieval knights, quests, and fairytales.
The head is one of the most striking of many examples strewn across Azazello’s notebooks. A fantasy world literally explodes from the top of the head, with walls, turrets, stars and flags all growing from the mind (or imagination) of the face. Like this one, these heads usually carry a peaceful, even happy expression, and gaze upwards towards the world that’s unfurling above them. The mind’s eye was, for Azazello, the pathway to a world which could genuinely excite him.
These are undeniably trippy images, as is so much of Azazello’s artwork. Drugs – opium in particular – deeply informed his life, his physical and mental health, and his creativity. The face we see in profile on the left-hand page has a poppy melded into his eye, which is a more peaceful version of the numerous sketches he made elsewhere which show syringes either protruding from or piercing someone’s eyeball. In either case, the symbolism is plain: opium alters perception and induces a new way of seeing the world.
Usually, in Azazello’s portrayals, this was an alteration for the better: a more beautiful world becomes visible. This was often a world covered in verdant plant-life, and here we see that leaves are actually growing from the face and beard of the opium-seer (also notice the tree growing from the much smaller head at the foot of the opposite page). While he gazes upwards with a peaceful smile, the adjacent face looks on mournfully – perhaps here we see a contrast between the worlds each one sees, with and without opium.
It is important to note that the visions people can have under various mind-altering substances are not usually experienced or described as though the drug creates some alien fantasy in their minds. Rather, the drug tends more often to be experienced as a conduit to another layer of reality which we otherwise cannot see; just as can’t see infrared or Wi-Fi signals, there are other levels of our reality which are invisible to us unless we use some technology – in this case, opium – to make us aware of them. When Azazello drew these fantastical images, they represented layers of reality which he truly believed to, or felt should, exist: kinship between people and nature; the heroic morality of fairytales; a sense of deep connection with the cosmos.
All the same, there is another thread we can detect in Azazello’s work – a sense of being trapped in his imagination. The world he was trying to describe in words and pictures was a far cry from the Soviet one in which he had to live, at least when he wasn’t flying away on doses of opium and other substances. His inner world seems to have been both infinitely more important and infinitely more rewarding to him, yet because he could never live in it all the time, or bring it back with him intact from the zone of kaif, it was left imprisoned (albeit as cell-mates with the positive emotions he associated with it) inside his mind.