hurlingham [ talk ]
post impressions George Pocheptsov’s recent membership of the Harvard Polo Team has led his artistic talents in a new direction, as he explains
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A mother and son shiver in a frosty Philadelphia drizzle. Behind them, a small pile of worn, tattered suitcases are drenched by the icy rain that fell ceaselessly on that December night. My mother and I had been evicted from our one-bedroom apartment and sent into an unforgiving shadow of poverty, grief and despair. I don’t remember the bitter night clearly, for I was an infant, but my mother’s memory and my imagination coalesce in this image of the downcast Madonna and child. With a pile of overdue bills to pay, and little understanding of the American job market, the last thing on my firstgeneration Ukrainian mother’s mind was her infant son’s entertainment. She would hand me an ancient pack of crayons and a few sheets of loose-leaf paper, and expect my imagination to fly. If I wanted to escape, or to express myself, it would have to be through those dreaded pieces of coloured wax. And so I drew. And I flew. As luck would have it, in a few months’ time, I had amassed a substantial collection of art. My mother brought examples of my drawings and paintings to a gallery owner in Bethesda, Maryland out of simple curiosity. The owner savoured the figures he saw drawn on the small pieces of paper, coloured lightly with a delicate balance of crayons and markers. He said he would display it, and my work quickly found buyers. Then we ran into another problem: people wanted to meet the artist behind the canvas. When these people did meet the artist, their jaws dropped to the floor, down where I stood at three-foot-eight. I began to be known as the ‘pint-sized Picasso’ and was summoned to television shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and Today. Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton, Michael Jordan and Celine Dion, celebrities who I assumed lived in our television box, commissioned me to do artwork. I never relished the publicity, and no matter who commissioned a painting, I only saw my objective as filling the blank canvas in front of me. Soon my mother’s and my poverty came to an end.
In third grade, I established a foundation that would donate my works of art to charitable galas for auction, and to this day, I have helped raise over eight million dollars for charitable causes ranging from the Georgetown University Hospital to the establishment of a scholarship fund for my local high school. I do what I love, and I believe other people should have the opportunity to do what they love. Hope is a tumultuous struggle. I have survived on hope my entire life, but I felt its succour most during the bitter years after my father’s death. That final December cold snap, and the long, riotous spring that
followed, gave me a reverence for the human capacity to dream, to follow the light of hope, and finally to become a beacon to others. In the fall of last year, I earned the opportunity to attend Harvard University, a lifelong dream. I met fascinating people, and made one of my best decisions to date – joining the Harvard Polo Team. I kept fond memories of a childhood of horseriding on a chestnut affectionately named Bebo, and as soon as I paid my first visit to the arena, my passion for horses came alive again. This past summer, the team was invited to Tommy Lee Jones’s ranch in San Saba, www.hurlinghampolo.com
