While some find it hard to choose a single occupation among all the options, others simply combine several into one. In rare cases, this multi-tasking ability brings success.
One such gifted and lucky person is 39-year-old Kyivan Pavlo Gudimov, an interior and landscape designer, musician, art collector and art show curator.
His life story can make one jealous. A co-founder and former member of Okean Elzy (Elza’s Ocean), one of Ukraine’s most popular rock bands, he also boasts a rather successful solo music career. As if that’s not enough, he owns a design studio and two art galleries.
Wearing glasses and a grey v-neck sweater, Gudimov looks more like a retired hipster than a former rock star as he sits on the bench in a small exhibition hall at his non-profit Ya Gallery in Kyiv. But wait until he starts speaking of rock music, his Jimmy Hendrix anthology, and how he first heard Ukrainian rock in the early 1990s.
Of his two main interests – art and music – art came to him first. The one and only exhibition of his art work took place in his parents’ apartment in Lviv, when Gudimov was just four years old. Impressed by Pablo Picasso’s works, he drew a bunch of cubist pictures. His grandfather, also Pavlo Gudimov, hung the drawings out on the handle of a mop, on the window cornice and on top of the cupboard, so the family could see the show.
“That meant a lot to me, these gestures of my grandfather. He had a strong influence on me,” Gudimov says.
His first guitar was also borrowed from his grandfather. Gudimov started playing at the age of 17, and blames that late age for not reaching the heights of mastery. He remembers well how impressed he was when he first heard Jimmy Hendrix play. The concert was broadcast on radio.
“I froze and stood there until the end of the concert. And then they announced it was Hendrix playing. He wasn’t playing guitar, he was a guitar himself,” he says excitedly.
Inspired by Russian and Ukrainian rock music, Gudimov and his three friends founded a band named Klan Tishiny (clan of Silence) in 1991. In three years, the group disbanded, and its former members founded Okean Elzy, which became extremely popular in the late 1990s. However, Gudimov refers to success as a “horrible, destructive word.”
Okean Elzy brought Gudimov his first big money. It was in 2001 when Pepsi chose the band for a new advertising campaign. Gudimov remembers he got about $20,000 from that contract and bought an apartment in Kyiv’s Podil neighborhood. He says that mattered a lot to him as he was raised in a family of modest means.
Gudimov’s years as a guitarist for Okean Elzy were filled with exhausting tours. But his love for art and design, supplemented with a degree in architecture, was a sleeping tiger waiting for its moment. The time came in 2005 when Gudimov left Okean Elzy.
“I’m Libra by Zodiac. My scales are balancing, and at that time the art and design outbalanced music,” Gudimov explains.
He also says that he had become disenchanted then with modern rock music, especially its commercial side. That didn’t stop him from trying out his own band, named Gudimov. It was successful in its first year or so, but later its founder switched focus to designing. He still plays jam sessions with friends twice a week or so.
Now, about six years after leaving big show business, Gudimov makes a living by running a design studio called Ya Design. He does several interior design projects a year by himself. According to him, the cost is $50-60 per square meter.
He also does some landscaping projects, planning private gardens. Kyiv, Gudimov says, needs to improve its landscape design. “I think that Kyiv is green by coincidence, not as a result of some efforts to make it so. If I could, I would fill the whole Maidan Nezalezhnosti with trees, like in a jungle,” he says.
When he started his studio, the interior design field in Ukraine was a disaster, he said, and “something needed to be done about it.” Now Gudimov emphasizes ascetic design and says he despises decorations.
His earnings are enough to support his living and his non-profit Ya Gallery. A small gallery on 49B Khoryva St. in Kyiv and another one in Dnipropetrovsk display contemporary Ukrainian art. While the one in Dnipropetrovsk is sponsored by a local businessman, the Kyiv gallery costs Gudimov about Hr 30,000-35,000 per month. In its nearly six years of existence, about 70 Ukrainian artists have exhibited their works in it. Gudimov selects artists and art works for shows on his own.
He also has a large collection of contemporary art and runs a publishing house called Artbook. Gudimov seems very confident in himself.
“If I wanted to become an oligarch, I think I would become one, but I never wanted,” he says. “I’m achieving things.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
