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Artspace Born in St. Petersburg Like most new galleries, the Gala, at the bottom of Lonsdale, started with a dream. The dream belonged to Michal and Nino Godshalk, and it became a reality at the start of this year. "We both grew up in an environment that was very conducive to appreciating fine art," says Michal, who was born in Czechoslovakia. "We were always encouraged to visit galleries. In later years, over the course of our careers, we made a lot of contacts with people involved in the arts and with the artists themselves." For Michal, the career was in engineering, and his English has about it an engineer's careful precision. Nino, a Georgian, trained as a geneticist. Both of them ended up in working in St. Petersburg, Peter the Great's old capital and the cultural heart of Russia. A wonderfully elegant and extravagantly-scaled city of white nights and frozen canals, St. Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, that airy treasure house whose collection of Picassos, Matisses and other modern masters rivals that of the Louvre. Michal first visited Vancouver in 1972, and kept coming back to what he came to regard as his adopted home. It wasn't just the natural beauty that attracted him. He found the province to be less conservative, less structured than anywhere else. He was intrigued by the tradition of immigrants coming to British Columbia and trying to recreate themselves here, trying to create a Utopia amid the geographical diversity and the immense isolation. By the time he and Nino (his wife) began to feel boxed in by their careers and restless for a change, he knew what he wanted to do. A four-year engineering project in Russia had given him the chance to travel around eastern Europe. What he saw inspired him. "I realized there was a wealth of artistic skill and artistic traditions and beautiful art that was sadly under-represented in western Canada. Nino, too, had many connections among the artists of Georgia and Armenia and Russia. We would draw on those resources and bring to the Canadian public art that was both under-represented and of very high quality." The first pool of talent they drew on was the artistic community of St. Petersburg. Its members had been through a long and rigorous training process, which meant a high level of technical skill. "The artists now have many different outlets to express themselves, both commercially and artistically. The previous direction of an 'official' line has disappeared. Actually, the artists were crossing that line before the Soviet Union collapsed. They would create certain paintings to conform with the official expectations, then create other works for themselves or for their friends or for dealers from other places." The market for their work grew rapidly in the late 1980s as Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalizing policies took hold. Suddenly St. Petersburg was full of foreign dealers looking for deals at fire sale prices. Since they paid in dollars they often found them, and hauled stuff away by the truckload. Over the last decade, though, things have quietened down. For one thing, the feeding frenzy flooded the market with work that was not necessarily of the highest quality, and it's taken a long time to recover. "We've tried to maintain our contacts with the artists who were holding back, staying with the directions they've chosen and not necessarily selling immediately to the Western bidders. They know what their art is worth." Nino points out that the Gala Gallery is not limiting itself just to artists from St. Petersburg. The Godshalks have also made contacts with artists in Vancouver with a view to future shows. "We want to show high-quality works created by immigrants that reflect their cultural traditions," Michal says. "And we feel that North Vancouver has fantastic potential to become the kind of artistic community we want to help create and be a part of." May | June 21