The artist is self -wrapping
From the book of memoirs of the artist “My Creative Way”: “I got into Ladoga from Duderhof. Ladoga was a fairy tale of Varangian.
All the time it seemed that due to the slope of the old Volkhov, an ancient sail with a warlike squad of Rurik was floating off.
And Duderhof was a modern fairy tale of solar joy. It was there that I made my series “The Joy of Life”. Did not immediately believe in it. Apparently, they really thought that the “fairy tale”, but now this “fairy tale” in the State Russian Museum.
A small house in the Duderhof mountains with a balcony towards Lake Krasnoselsky opened this tale of joy to me. But most of all this fairy tale on the shore attracted me, where people – children and, mainly, our youth – with such bright joy gave out to the rays of the sun, tempered and husbands.
Here I first met with such an inspired collective walking to the sun. I haven’t seen anything like this before. Healthy naked youths with their physical education gestures accurately laid particles in their muscles with the sun pierced by the sun. And girls in their multi -colored bathing suits bloomed with slim inflorescences of youth. All this lived, moved, splashed in water. And some lay or stood, giving themselves to the sun.
I was among them. It would be funny to have a sketchbook and try to write off anything. The hopelessness of this was obvious to me. I could only write a line, only a line, one or another. I had to absorb these movements, these images, this system of moving people and the color from the tanning. I was attached to one or another image and watched it persistently and daily. The leaflets lay at home, and these figures appeared on them, their movements, their rhythm, their color. Of these sheets, the composition “Joy of life” was composed. In two versions. One of them is developed, strict and harmonious, freed from everything that might seem superfluous, and the other is very multi -figured, capturing the entire pathos of the phenomenon. But life is complicated, so far neither I managed to complete, although the desire to implement it fades away ”.
