Winter paintings by Valentin Gubarev that bring a smile and warm the soul

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

For more than a dozen years he has been creating his extraordinary works artist from Minsk Valentin Gubarev, who is generously endowed by nature with a special vision of the world, a great sense of humor and irony, as well as artistic talent. His funny works have been published more than once on the pages of our online magazine, each time arousing great interest among readers. Today, a selection of works is dedicated to kindness and warmth. This topic is very relevant on cold winter days and on the eve of New Year's holidays.

The artist has his own stylistic devices, with which he takes the viewer to the living. Subtle humor, sarcasm and firsthand knowledge of the life and life of the inhabitants of the provincial hinterland - all this can be seen in abundance in the works of the master. They sometimes look like half-forgotten episodes from old films, a little sad, a little funny, but so cute and charming.

Behind each work of the artist there is a short life story in which the heroes sincerely experience, suffer, rejoice, in a word, live their own lives. By the definition of the master himself, the characters in his paintings are “ordinary people” who “have not read Hegel and Kant”, but are “disinterested, pure in heart”, who “have no commercial streak,” but “have a desire for happiness”. In the basis of many plots, the author laid childhood and youthful memories, seasoned with notes of nostalgia, and took household items from Soviet times.

The artist confesses that he practically does not come up with subjects for his new works. He simply lives, contemplating reality from a special point of view, peculiar only to artists. And what he sees around - perceives sincerely and directly. And being inspired, he begins to create, splashing out on the picture plane everything that he has spied on in life itself: both peasants who think for three, and a woman hanging out linen, and a grandfather who watches a neighbor through a fence crack, and much more than a provincial life.

Once, giving an interview to journalists, Valentin Gubarev said that he had no bad heroes:

A little about the master of naive art

Valentin Alekseevich Gubarev (born in 1948) is from Nizhny Novgorod. He is a painter, graphic artist, writing in the genre of naive art, a member of the Belarusian Union of Artists. Behind the master and the art school, and the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. Since 1975 he moved to Minsk and has been living and writing his works in Belarus for 43 years. Throughout his creative career, he has repeatedly participated in domestic and international creative forums. Today his works are kept in museums and leading galleries in France, Belarus, USA, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain.

Somehow in the mid-1990s, the French literally fell in love with Gubarev's work. And the gallery Les Tournesols signed a collaboration contract with the painter for sixteen years. It would seem, what can Europeans understand in works that are understandable in their semantic sound only to immigrants from the Soviet Union? Nevertheless, Gubarev's exhibitions were held with a bang in other Western European countries.

The artist Valentin Gubarev has many different cycles of works in his creative arsenal. One of them - "Beautiful is far away", where the artist, with his characteristic humor and irony, depicted the Soviet past.