Dear Reader, When people ask what I do for a living, I say, “I’m a writer.” And the best piece of advice I ever received about my profession was offered by the esteemed poet, W. S. Merwin. “Every word should be carved out of stone.” In other words, make your writing worth reading. Excellent writing is the purpose of IdaHome magazine and normally, my Publisher’s Letter is dedicated to introducing our great writers and articles herein. This month, however, I looked up (literally, 500 hundred feet in the air) and saw someone who deserves special attention. As the crow flies, Boise is 5,383 miles from Minsk, Belarus, where Yulia Avgustinovich was born. Her life sounds like a modern Russian novel, as her passion for painting led her to study classical art in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, where she met an American tourist and musician. They got married in Las Vegas and then settled in Denver. Today, Yulia, her husband, and their two daughters, Alexandria, 3, and Isabella, 5 months, are visiting Boise for a month while she operates the construction-grade cherry-picker that lifts her with brushes and paint to adorn the Hendrix building at Jefferson and 9th with Idaho-centric beauty. “I decided early that my purpose as an artist is to make public art,” says Yulia. “Art that everyone can enjoy for free.” Yulia won the Alexa Rose Foundation’s international competition to design and paint a downtown Boise mural. “I studied Idaho—the history, the images, the culture—and then created the design you see on the walls,” she explains. “I begin at the top and work my way down in ten-foot grids. I have painted many murals, but this is my biggest. And often, there is no budget for a mechanical lift—so I rappel off the roof and hang in a harness.” On her website, Yulia is wearing wings in photos that suggest she could also paint the walls of Mount Everest. (yulia-art.com) All day long for a month now, in summer heat, Yulia deftly raises and lowers the intimidating, fivestory lift, a mechanical skill she learned online. Her canvas is concrete, but the Basque dancers, the giant hawk and bear, and the Syringa blossom look alive. She returns to earth, of course, several times a day, to breastfeed Isabella in the parking lot while cars and pedestrians pass by, oblivious to the magic that awaits us all, for free, if we just LOOK UP!
Thank you, Yulia and the Alexa Rose Foundation! Welcome to summer with IdaHome!
Karen
www.idahomemagazine.com
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