Let the Light Shine In

Interview by Pam Parziale                October 2025

Before one enters the workshops of Tatyana and Evgeny Zidarov, you have to just pause and catch your breath. The sunlight is breaking through the overhanging branches of the Potomac, and the river is jewel-like, sparkling, and pulsing with life.

Rock Fusion Studio is almost pristine in its orderliness. Tatayana is a glass artist and occupies the riverside of the sunlit room. Evgeny is a jewelry and lapidary artist; his worktables and tools are spread across the opposite half of the room.

Tatayana says, “As a child I really liked color and to draw pictures. It was not easy as you can imagine, but I went to a technical school and finished with a degree in economics.” Finding herself in a new environment, teaching computer technology in nearby Hagerstown, Maryland, Tatyana saw her work as logical, like putting pieces of a puzzle together. But it was stressful, and she longed to return to her love of art.

Enter Evgeny, who gave her a gift, the chance to study fused glass. Before long, a kiln appeared in the studio. “It just makes me so happy!” Tatyana says. On the worktable are landscapes of fused glass, layers with tiny bits of color sandwiched within and slowly fused in the kiln at 1400 f. degrees. Colorful bowls of woven strings of glass are waiting for their turn in the kiln. She is eager to share her knowledge, and students’ work from a recent class mingle with the imaginary flowers of her current project.

Evgeny has the ability to combine different skills, working in metal, wrapping, folding, twisting, and pounding to create bracelets of silver and copper. For his work in lapidary, he must decide on the cutting of a stone. What will the large pink jasper reveal, once open to the light after millenniums? “Once the stone is cut there is no going back,” he says and holds an agate with its revelations of purple, green and yellow. The stone then faces a complex array of machinery and tools for sanding and polishing. Only then does the jeweler meticulously wrap the stone into a necklace.

The artists are constantly exploring possibilities, whether in their chosen medium or the chance to meet other artists. They make me think of Albert Einstein, who said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

Tatyana is excited about an upcoming trip to learn more about the secrets of Mirano glass at a workshop near Milan, Italy. Evgeny recently returned from the Joseph Campbell Folk School in Georgia where he studied the ancient craft of scrimshaw.

Tatyana and Evgeny talk easily about navigating the precarious lives of the artist, leaving old boundaries behind. The nearby Potomac River with its eddies and estuaries, always moving onward, seems a perfect metaphor for these two accomplished artists.