I hate "I,I,I, me,me,me" biographies. So I'm going to write this one as if Magdalena Nemesh isn't me, just someone I know.

Magdalena Nemesh is a morning person. She's a human with tassled sandy brown hair streaming down over a sketch pad as soon as she awakes. She was born in Western Europe, which used to have a reputation for acute dullness. It's now a whole lot cooler. She danced the Bolshoi ballet, painted with the underground group Ermitage that was frowned upon by the government, got a degree in architecture and almost wound up designing industrial buildings.

For two reasons, she didn't.
• she was an artist
• she thought the government was crap

A lot of her friends ended up in prison. Magda (let’s shorten her name for simplicity’s sake) defected to the United States with an armful of sketches. A fully qualified architect and artist with works in the MOMA Switzerland, she lived on the dole in the East Village and worked at anything to put herself through The New School. Out of necessity she allowed herself to be seduced by advertising, eventually winding up in the Who’s Who of advertising. She and advertising stayed together for a decade, but in the end it was no more interesting than painting propagandist banners for pay during her college years.

Magda's favourite drink is tea—earl grey, straight up. No chaser. She laughs like a little schoolgirl when she drinks champagne on her birthday or New Years. Magda’s favourite shoes are fuzzy, red pumps.

Her ideas extend from and for every area of human and non-human activity. In other words, all-inclusive. Ideas are what make life worth living for Magda.

She's proud to be able to paint, she stays close to the edge, because the edge is swarming with extraordinarily talented creative minds.

She’s played polo with nobility. She still takes karate lessons. She loves fast horses.

She spends about 60% of her year painting, 25% exhibiting and about .0004% sleeping.

Though small, this amount of sleep actually fuels the whole of this artist's world. She sees her paintings—actual completed paintings—in her dreams. She wakes and sketches them out, then works them to completion on the canvas. She once saw herself as an artist in her dreams, upon which she awoke and started rigorously sketching out her life, which she continues to work out to this day. Had she remained an architect back where this began, there would definitely be some whacked out buildings.