On January 21st a great event had taken place – the Annual Inner Speech Contest, during which you have had a chance to listen to the best speakers of the club! Congratulations to Tatiana Nechaeva and Roman Topoliuk who have received their first and the second places in the tough battle! Tatiana and Roman will represent the Art Talkers TM Club at the All Ukrainian Contest in April!

January 14th Art Talkers celebrates its 6th Anniversry! The Club welcomes its members and guests to share the Birthday cake and holiday spirit on such an important event!

Art Talkers TM Club wishes all a very Happy New Year!!! May 2012 bring you prosperity, joy, happiness, good health and more opportunities to self development! Please join our next meeting on January 14th!

On December 24th our last meeting of the year 2011 took place. To celebrate Christmas and the coming New Year Art Talkers team went to watch a movie in ATMASFERA planetarium (http://www.atmasfera.com.ua) about the Earth. We all expanded our knowledge about the planet and had a great time!

We meet every Saturday from 11:10 to 12:40 in Babuin at 10, Symona Petlyury (Kominterna), Kyiv.
You can join us for the meeting while having your morning coffee and stay afterwards for a delicious lunch.

ArtTalkers held elections on Saturday June 13th. Founding member Olga Pogorelova will continue as VP education.  Graham Seibert will serve as president and Valentina Karabayeva as VP membership. Rounding out the team are two longtime members from our British Council days and before, Victor Fursov VP PR and Liz Korotchenko, Secretary, and newer member Nataliya Panchenko as Sergeant at Arms.  Olga Boskeno will serve temporarily as Treasurer. 

Since most of the new team have served as officers before, we have only one departing officer to thank, Kostya Orekhov our VP Membership.  Tanya will continue to serve as Immediate Past President, and Lucy Povaliy as Past Past President.  Having these founding members actively involved is a source of strength and stability for  our club.  Thanks!

Art Club 44 was especially convenient because there was a meeting afterwards in the same place on the topic of — art. We paid special attention to our schedules so we ended the meeting precisely at 12:30 so we could drift over to where the discussion.

Katya Mezentseva delivered her speech number two entitled “time management” using a couple of very graphic images. The first is of a large bowl. You can put a lot into it if you fill up first with large stones, then with pebbles, then with sand and lastly with water, each filling the space that was left empty by the last. But if you start with the sand, you will never get the big stones in. This is the metaphor: if you do not put your top priorities first, you will never achieve them. Her second was from a book entitled “Eat That Frog.” Its message is similar. When you lay out all of the things that have to be accomplished within a day, it is not a bad idea to start with the most distasteful one first. Otherwise you can procrastinate forever.

Roman Isakov asked two questions of a total of five impromptu speakers for table topics. They were unusually successful, and that everybody was able to take about two minutes putting together an entertaining and original answer. His theme was stereotypes and preconditioned responses. The first concerned money. Do you have to choose between money and happiness, beauty and utility or can you have it all? Do we fight false dichotomies?

Igor jumped right in and said why not have it all? Olga Pogorelova, well-informed on most subjects, cited a literary source: Louisa Haig. Her advice was to imagine yourself, or even more strongly, tell yourself that you are what you want to be. “I am rich.” Do not cast it in a negative, as in “I am not poor,” or in some other tense such as “I will be rich.” Our president Tania took the discussion off on another direction, noting how differently children of a new generation perceived beauty. Stereotypes do not serve us at all.

Igor second question concerned art. His contention was that art is subjective, the experiences in the viewer and not in the piece itself. Mark agreed, citing one of Goya’s portraits of the royal family of Spain. He was such a masterful painter that he created a work in which one could see what they wanted. The royal family saw themselves as looking — majestic. Other viewers could look at the painting and say that they looked like vapid fools.  Kostya put a psychological spin on Mark’s comment saying that art is a way of cognition. Everybody perceives it worked differently if you wanted to find the reality of the work, you would have to compose something like a hologram, a three-dimensional assemblage of each viewers individual two-dimensional perception.

We will meet at the Art Club 44 again next week.

Quite a collection of old time members turned out to welcome him back Bob South and Elena Domotenko, two personalities who contributed greatly to the growth of the Toastmasters movement in Ukraine half a decade ago.

Bob’s story was truly inspiring. He stumbled upon Toastmasters has something to do, an alternative to sitting home and watching TV, and made it the focal point of his life for three years in Ukraine. He progressed quickly as a Toastmaster and assumed about every office that was available. More than that, he was inspired by his constant contact with better educated Ukrainians to complete his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. And, capping it all, he married a fellow Toastmaster and has a son to show for it!  He is here en route to Seattle, where he will retire and enter another career, perhaps teaching.

Olga Pogorelova served as Toastmaster.  Graham Seibert gave a speech entitled “Love and Marriage” in which he traced the rather separate histories of the two concepts until they finally came together in medieval England. Victor Fursov made extremely imaginative use of props that he pulled out of a bag of tricks and then out of his pockets in a speech entitled “Humor and Love.” He had us rolling in the aisles.

Lucy Povaliy asked members to raise toasts to Valentine’s Day. As table topics evaluator Mark Taylor pointed out the problem with her strategy of calling on seasoned Toastmasters. They will take the topic wherever they want! In any case, we had very interesting short talks by Levon Petrosian, Mykola Latansky, Elena Domotenko, club member Kate who was having a birthday, Julia Dmytryshym and Mark Taylor himself.

After the meeting we had an extended lunch with Bob South as he shared his wisdom on how to run Toastmasters organizations at every level from club to region. Graham Seibert took notes, which he has invited other attendees to amend, which should be of interest to every club officer in Ukraine.

President Tania Knyazeva asked how we liked the Art club 44 as a place to meet. So far as I know the feeling was unanimous: we like it! We will move the meeting time to 11:15 to accommodate the club, and we plan to make it our permanent location.

On February 7, we had only one speaker who was an ATM speaker Olga Pogorielova. She told about Niccolo Paganini (October 27, 1782 – May 27, 1840), an Italian violinist, violist, guitarist and composer. Olga brought two musical compositions on CD to supplement her speech. The beginning of her speech was accompanied by Caprice No. 24 in A minor, being one of Paganini’s best known compositions. Olga ended her speech with the words from the lyrics of the song “A road without end” (the Soviet movie “Niccolo Paganini”, 1982), and then people listened to a fragment of this song.

Mark Taylor served as toastmaster. Graham Seibert as Table Topics host recycled an idea from last week’s EBA meeting: explain to a six-year-old where the wind comes from, or why there have to be both boys and girls.

We had several guests: Valentina, Natalia, Kate, Masha, Helena, Pavel, and a special treat, Sasha, the President of Toastmasters Lviv.

This week we met in the library’s cozy back room. There was space enough for everybody, but not much allowance for growth. Next week we intend to meet at Khreshetik 44. Please check back about Thursday for confirmation.

As the pictures show, Kostya had us waltzing to and from the podium today. Dance is his art. Tania chose Picasso as the subject of her 6th speech from the advanced manual. Picasso had many insights, but one of the most important is that after you have learned technique, reached adulthood and achieved what feels like success, you have to let it go and start again as a child.

Table topics master Olga Pogorielova asked Mark if his dreams ever came true, and, yes they have! Igor dreams in color, Liz finds that dreams offer a kind of parallel existence, Lucy’s dreams are so varied she doesn’t even attempt to control them, and Alla said yes, of course her dreams are influenced by her life’s experience.