The one-man exhibition of Vologda’s artist Georgy Popov was opened in the Museum of Dionisy’s Frescoes within the framework of the project “Peasant Myth”. Georgy Popov is famous not only in our country, but also far outside it. Representatives of the professional community and art lovers have been keeping this man’s fate and creative work in sight for a long time. The artist was at the height of his fame in the 1970-1980s when his numerous one-man exhibitions and group displays were held in the museums of our country and abroad. His famous still-life “Generous Land” (the Vologda Regional Picture Gallery) published in many editions became paradigmatic, it represents a certain symbol of the whole Vologda region. Reproductions of this picture are included into school textbooks of the “Sources” series. The story with the still-life is significant because the virtual image of abundance and prosperity found by the artist by intuition turned out to be archetypical that has timeless characteristics.
Georgy Popov was born in the Krasnoye settlement of the Totma district in the Vologda region on September 15, 1939. He doesn’t have any professional art education. He has been participating in interregional, regional and international art exhibitions since 1967. He joined the Union of Russian Artists in 1980. His one-man exhibitions were held with great success in Vologda (1973, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1996, 1999), Leningrad (1989, 1996), Kostroma (1986), Kineshma (1986), Ivanovo (1986), Syktyvkar (1987), Cherepovets (1986), Totma (1977, 1983), Chagoda (1979). His works are kept in the Vologda Picture Gallery, the Vologda State Museum-Preserve for History, Architecture and Art, the Totma Intermunicipal Museum Association, local history museums of the Vologda region, private collections in Russia and abroad. The artist works in the oil painting technique creating landscapes, still-lifes, genre and narrative pictures. His drawings are notable for exact design and detailing.
A peculiar light world made of small coloured strokes is depicted in the canvases of the master. The vibrating environment created by the artist gives you a feeling of certain ephemerality of the depiction assimilating it to a miraculous vision where articles don’t have density and mass. These insubstantial characteristics are also inherent in his genre paintings. Scenes of village life and holidays repeating from a picture to a picture cannot end and be interrupted because the cycle of the seasons and the human life on the earth are reflected in them. His works don’t have anything accidental at the same time: every article, character and gesture are sensible and subordinate not only to the general composition, but are in the context of the narration. The artist is precise in details and he understands who should be added to the picture and what for. His view on the environment helps him to remember not only nuances of the states of nature, but actions of characters subordinate to the single dramatic idea of the picture.
It is considered that Georgy Popov depicts life as it is. It is correct only partly. The effect of reality and the facts of life is reached thanks to the literary part of his pictures. He began as a poet not without purpose. (It is known that having read his “Poem about Love”, Nikolay Rubtsov said: “It is written finely!”)
Georgy Popov’s works can be called poeticized recollections turned into the language of painting. They are probably based on the stages of the artist’s life connected with the period when he was young and happy. The depicted reality in his pictures reminds of the paradise in the colour solution (“Paradise” is the name of a hut in one of his works; he also wrote the poem “Paradise Days”). This subject is continued in the painting “Sokolik Pine Forest” where the northern swamp covered with fog is perceived as a wonderful garden. A group of trees rising over the horizon is treated as a crown of the world tree hovering above the paradise herbs. A lonely old man sitting in full-back position on the potato field is also in the earthly Paradise rich in fruit (“Autumn Loneliness”). Our look is also turned to the evening horizon. This simple subject contains no admiration of the expanses and no yearning for anything that is irretrievably lost, but it contains a feeling of autumn of life, kind fruit and expectation of parting with this wonderful world where love and labour continue living.
Georgy Popov lives and works in Vologda since 1983. His personal carefully collected and systematized library numbers about four thousand books and as many magazines. “Collection of Magazines for Recollections” is especially interesting among them. The artist has made notes in it about the most significant moments of his life in which there are not many external events at present. The exhibition of Georgy Popov in the Museum of Dionisy’s Frescoes is implementation of the employees’ lifelong dream and an opportunity for local residents and guests of Ferapontovo to see the works of one of the most outstanding and recognizable artists of the Vologda region.
