Expressive oriental motifs on palette knife paintings drawn with fingers and a roller

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

- once noted artist Valery Blokhin, traveling a lot in the countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, studying the life and culture of the peoples living there. And then he threw out his impressions of what he saw on the canvases with an extravaganza of bright colors and conquered the whole world. In our publication there is a story about an amazing Krasnodar painter and a gallery of his amazing works, united in the "Silk Road" cycle.

Valery Blokhin is a well-known colorist, whose name is widely known not only in Russia and the Krasnodar Territory, but also far abroad. Valery Blokhin's personal exhibitions have more than once been held with great success in Russia, in many European countries, as well as in North and Latin America, the Far East, South Africa and the Maghreb countries.

He is the owner of the gold medal of the Academy of Arts of the Czech Republic. Masaryk, of which he has been an honorary member for many years, and the silver medal of the Russian Academy of Arts, where he is also a corresponding member. His paintings are impressions brought from numerous travels around the world. Each of his works, clearly structured compositionally, conveys the color-tonal features of various corners of the earth as accurately as possible, which is a great rarity in the artistic world. It is this extraordinary creative approach to painting that has become the artist's hallmark. And although it is very difficult for specialists to determine the direction of Valery Blokhin's work, the author himself refers it to subjective realism.

East is a delicate matter

Oriental motifs on Valery Blokhin's canvases appeared in connection with exhibitions abroad. It all started in 1990 in Germany, and then there was India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka. It was the East that introduced into his work the expression of the color characteristic of these regions. Each subsequent trip brought many new impressions and shocks. New emotions were so strong that they became the main theme in the work of the master. All the impressions he received from his travels to the countries of the East, he captured on canvases: this is how the Tibetan, Arabian, Vietnamese, Egyptian, Japanese series appeared, which he combined into a single cycle "Silk Road".

A creative manner that bewitches even the viewer who is far from the art of painting

As the painter himself admits, he never thinks out the plots of his paintings in advance - they were born, as they say, on the go. The author begins each of his works with abstract color spots, and only then looks for reality in them, some kind of hint of drawing. Curiously, music is an integral part of the creative process for an artist. Only to the sounds of his favorite melodies does he completely surrender to the mood and begins to create. Every creative person knows: if you take up work without the mood, nothing good will come of it.

The painter generously plays with uncomplicated plots in his paintings with an unbridled color scheme. It's amazing how, through silhouettes and bright colors, he manages to very accurately convey the mood and essence of the depicted. Valery Blokhin himself, answering the questions of curious contemplators, says that he has no special secrets, but watching his impromptu is incredibly interesting even for people far from art. Each of his works is a kind of self-sufficient, self-contained world, where he skillfully leads the viewer along the path of visual perception.

Technique and tools

Many have probably already noted the artist's unusual painting style, slightly reminiscent of watercolor. Nevertheless, Blokhin paints in oils and in a very non-standard way. He rarely uses brushes in his work, mostly fingers are used (according to the artist, the texture of the material, the thickness of the paint layer is better felt this way). But by and large he works on his canvases with a palette knife and a roller, applying strokes one after another, different in tonality, saturation and density.

Skillfully wielding these tools, the artist, like a magician, gradually draws recognizable images on the canvas, for example, Bedouins with camels or a warrior-horseman rushing somewhere into the distance, nomads or mysterious oriental women.

Color spot - as the main attribute of the plot

The whole secret is in the technical approach, which the artist did not come to at once. Only by trial and error, and also thanks to his perseverance and hard work, he found his unique signature style and gained worldwide fame. The key role in the formation of the master was played by his acquaintance with the artist Alexei Parshkov, who recommended not to spare paint and experiment more with color.

Bright painting on the verge of abstraction

Being an excellent master of drawing, the nuances of which he mastered while still at art school, Valery began to literally pour the diluted paint onto a canvas lying on a horizontal surface, and when it spread in different directions, mixing, creating pretentious stains and unusual combinations, he began to think abstractly and literally using the power of your imagination to "pull" a plot out of these spots.

And since the work did not come from the form, but from the color spot, a professional sense of color soon came. In this way, his special technique developed: first, abstract spots, and only then reality is added.

And if earlier in his work he relied on a preliminary pencil sketch, now - first on emotions, and only then on details … Look closely, the expressiveness in his works is simply off scale. But even more striking is the master's ability to stop in time so as not to make the work too complete. But sometimes it is so difficult to grasp this line, after which any interference in the picture will only harm it …

A few words from the biography of the master colorist

Artist Valery Maratovich Blokhin was born in 1964 in Novorossiysk. As a boy, he was fond of judo and art. And when it came time to choose, I chose the latter. Because both hobbies were sorely lacking in time. Having dropped judo, he graduated from the local art school and went to enter the Krasnodar Art School. In 1984 Blokhin was already a certified specialist. In less than three years, Valery will gradually become a participant in city, regional, republican, all-union and international exhibitions. In 1990 he became a member of the Union of Artists of Russia, and since 2007 - a member of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia.

It should be noted that Valery Maratovich's family is also creative: the colorist says.

Each painter has his own vision of the world and its perception. And we sometimes do not notice that we are looking at the surrounding reality through the eyes of this or that master, since this is their purpose. Today we propose to look at the world around us through the eyes of Valentin Rekunenko by looking at the gallery of his works in our publication: An artist-storyteller from Ukraine writes phantasmagorias for children and adults, which are transferred to other worlds.