Artist of the Month: Boris Rudelson
I'm a watercolor artist based in Wayland, and this November's show will be my debut with ARTS Wayland. I trained across several media in art school but have always gravitated back to graphic materials — watercolor, pastel, chalk, pencil — over oil or acrylic. There's something about watercolor's transparency that oil doesn't have: each layer adds to what's beneath it rather than covering it up, so the painting keeps building rather than hiding its own history.
My work splits into two threads. One is nature — forests, brooks, mushrooms, the quiet corners of the woods. The other is whimsical architecture: cottages, lighthouses, gloomy and funny little houses that start as pencil sketches and stay close to that first idea as color goes in. I've made close to fifty of these over the past couple of years, and one grew into a children's book, Whimsical Way: A Curious Journey on a Special Street.
I grew up near Saint Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg and painted it more times than I can count — including one frosted winter morning that still feels like the truest version. For this show, I'm bringing three whimsical houses and two forest pieces.
What is Art for you?
Art, for me, is a way of paying attention. I spend most of my time running a business — solving practical problems, meeting deadlines — and painting is the opposite of that. It's slow, and it rewards noticing things: the way light sits on a mushroom cap, the particular gray of a winter morning on a cathedral I walked past every day of my childhood.
Letting my imagination run loose on a page is also just how I relax — and it spills back into my work. Some of my best ideas as a website designer come after I've spent an evening sketching a crooked little house that doesn't need to make sense.
I think we've grown less romantic as a culture, more practical, and I see it in how people respond to whimsical or imaginative work versus a few years ago. That makes me want to keep making it, not less. A crooked little house with too many windows doesn't solve anything — it just asks you to feel something for a second. That's what I'm after. Not a message, just a moment of noticing.
What are you currently working on?
Right now I'm working on a piece from a series I call Towers of Elsewhere — a riverbank city built from eight tall, stacked towers of small houses, each one leaning and mismatched in a way no city planner would allow. It grew out of the same instinct as my whimsical house portraits, just pushed further: instead of one crooked cottage, a whole skyline of them, piled up along the water.
I started it the way I start all of these, with a pencil sketch, and I'm staying close to that first drawing as the color goes in — layering watercolor so the structure keeps showing through. It's the most ambitious thing I've attempted in this style, and it'll likely be one of the pieces I bring to the ARTS Wayland show in November.
What’s your background? What is the experience that has influenced your work the most?
I trained at an art school in Leningrad, USSR — what's now Saint Petersburg, Russia. It wasn't a single-medium program; I took courses across a range of art media and techniques, and what stuck with me most from those years wasn't any one lesson but the sheer volume of it: many, many hours of graphic sketching, over and over, until drawing stopped being a deliberate act and became something closer to a reflex.
That's the experience that shaped my work most. It's why I still start everything — the whimsical houses, the towers, even a forest scene — with a pencil sketch before any color touches the page. The habit was built decades ago, in a different country, before I ever imagined I'd be painting Massachusetts riverbanks and crooked cottages, but it's still the foundation everything else sits on.
Where do you find your inspiration?
Mostly the world directly in front of me, and photographs — ones I take on my own travels, or ones I come across online of places I haven't been. Saint Isaac's Cathedral is the clearest example: I lived on the street facing it and painted it from memory and direct observation more times than I can count, including a frosted winter morning that came straight from having actually seen it look that way.
The forest pieces work the same way, just less anchored to one place — brooks, mushrooms, wildlife, the kind of scene I might walk past or find in a photo and want to slow down and look at properly. The whimsical houses are more invented, but even those usually start from some real roofline or window I noticed somewhere and couldn't stop thinking about.
What is your creative process?
My process is pretty consistent regardless of subject: I start with a pencil sketch and stay close to it — the final painting usually ends up near that first drawing rather than wandering far from it. Once the sketch is set, I build up several layers of watercolor, letting each one add to what's underneath instead of covering it. Then I work in shading to give the piece depth, and finish by picking out the small details that make it feel specific — a window, a texture, a bit of light — rather than generic.
It's a fairly disciplined sequence for something that starts as pure imagination, but I think that's part of why it works: the structure of the process gives the whimsy somewhere to land.
Did your style change over the years? In which way?
Yes — it's become more detail-oriented over time. Early on I was more concerned with getting the overall shape and mood of a piece right; now I find myself drawn into the smaller elements — the texture of a roofline, the particular way light catches one window versus another. It's less about painting a house or a tree in general and more about painting that specific one, with whatever oddity makes it its own.
I think it comes from doing this long enough that the broad strokes stopped being the hard part, which leaves more attention free for the small stuff.
What is the most challenging part about creating your artworks?
The hardest part is holding the line between the real world and the whimsical. My work lives right on that boundary — a house that's clearly a house, on a street you could believe in, but tilted or stacked or windowed in a way that couldn't actually stand. Push too far toward realism and it just becomes an illustration of architecture; push too far the other way and it tips into fantasy for its own sake, and loses the thing that made it interesting in the first place.
Keeping a piece exactly on that edge — believable enough to feel like a place, strange enough to feel imagined — is the real work every time. It's less a technical challenge than a constant judgment call, piece by piece.