mother picture
In the work “Sleeping” by Maria Lomakina, the image of a sleeping old mother seems to the viewer defenseless, vulnerable and fragile. There is no doubt that she is full of boundless love and compassion, she. The arrangement of the hands focuses on the face of the heroine, which is the compositional center of this painting. The flickering pictorial texture resembles a dream unfolding in the human mind.
Petrov-Vodkin KS Portrait of the artist’s mother. 1909. Oil on canvas. Russian Museum
“Portrait of the Artist’s Mother” by Petrov-Vodkin was painted twenty years before Lomakina’s work – in 1909. The image of a gray-haired woman with a clear, distant gaze is filled with enlightenment and humility before any life trials. The influence of the tradition of icon painting in the person of Anna Pantleevna is undoubtedly predicted. The image of a mother, a former serf, who brought up Christian values in the artist, is also read as an archetype, but not a defenseless, fragile woman like Lomakina, but eternal, full of wisdom, love for all living beings and the eternal power of a saint.
Still life
In the postwar years, the still life genre became a kind of “vent” for many artists who did not fit into the genre of socialist realism. Lomakin was no exception. There seems to be nothing experimental in his still lifes from these years. However, the 1946 work “Wildflowers from Dolinka” contains a certain dynamic – a view of the vase from above and the sharp diagonals of the boards. This is especially noticeable when compared to Flowers and Peaches, a more decorative still life. In this unexpected dynamic for a still life, it is easy to predict the outcome of Lomakina’s learning from Petrov-Vodkin, who made this genre for him an incredible field of experiments.
After the revolution and in the 1920s, Petrov-Vodkin worked a lot in the still life genre. In it, however paradoxical it may sound, he managed to express the basic principles of his artistic method, including “problems of movement.” In his still lifes, you can often see reflective planes that create the effect of additional dimensions. For example, in one of the 1925 still lifes presented at the exhibition, in addition to a faceted glass of water, a metal spoon and a paper box, a mirror surface on which these objects are projected, as well as possibly a door creating additional depth. A series of simple objects in Petrov-Vodkin’s still lifes appear before the viewer as part of the cosmic world. He also offered his students to think outside of standard categories: for example, conveying different textures in a single color or simply creating a sense of dynamics through compositional techniques.
Crimea
The Crimean peninsula occupied a fundamentally different place in the works of Petrov-Vodkin and Lomakina. For Kuzma Sergeevich, who first visited the Crimea in 1927, it was a place forever associated with the cure for tuberculosis, which he was diagnosed with in 1929. It was a place where staying away from family was mandatory and the use of paint was prohibited. Here he sketched his life, mostly ironically, on the margins of his letters to his wife and daughter.
However, in the year of his first visit to the Crimea, a terrible event occurred – the 1927 earthquake – that became one of the most devastating in history. The natural disaster became an inspiration for the artist, who was impressed by the power of the vent of Vesuvius, which he saw in 1905. Therefore, when everyone began to actively collect things and leave the peninsula, Petrov-Vodkin refused to evacuate. The result was the painting “Earthquake in Crimea”, embodying all the principles of its artistic and theoretical system: human figures from a global perspective and different angles. The center of the composition, the vertical axis around which the space wraps – a young man, his whole body pressed against a column and his head thrown back, as if waiting for a new push. A terrible event lacks tragic expression and acquires a planetary scale and timeless character in Petrov-Vodkin.
For Maria Lomakina, Crimea was her homeland, the place where she grew up and loved very much. This could not but affect how he appeared on his canvases. Lomakina’s male portraits of the Crimean Tatars are incredibly impressive. Portrait of a smoking Tatar is full of inner energy. His dark, masculine face is covered with wrinkles, but his sideways gaze is indifferent to the audience’s assessment. Before us is a representative of a proud people, an image personifying the strength and power of the region, sun-saturated fields and hard rocky mountains. But the landscapes of Lomakina’s hometown, while saturated with the author’s love for these places, are far from idealized postcard images. In the work “Road in the Crimean Mountains”, the curved arc of the horizon again reminds of a global perspective. Coloring creates the appearance of an area that receives plenty of sun despite cloudy skies.