Fine art expert / Nesvetailo Tatiana

The painting is performed in confident Realistic style. Using the zigzag composition the artist unfolds the space and reproduces multilayered impression given by this spot of nature, where water, earth and sky elements unite with the hand-made rhythm of yachts and masts. Interlacing relative white and green wedges, each repeated twice, such as green-covered hill and its vibrating reflection in the water, the bulk of yachts and the ephemeral silhouette of the mountain in the background, the painter opposes the real and tangible with the changeable and unsteady. The upper and lower parts of the canvas - water and sky - are connected with verticals of masts, real as well as reflected. The author’s craftsmanship is evident not only in masterly portrayal of space filled with air, but also in the endless variety of stroke techniques, that, though the color range is rather restraint, grant the impression of richness to the pictorial texture.

The painting seems to come into being by the artist’s subconsciousness, as a presentiment of spring’s refreshing arrival. Though simple in forms, it evokes many associations. The painter uses local colors of cold shades, mostly without elaboration. And only in five elements at the upper part of composition we can see the evident color movement. Firstly, we may consider it as a glance from above on the evoking ground, bound by snow-ice winter cover just fragmentally, which is defined by bluish-white masses of color. Besides, these five elements at the upper part of the painting bring associations with track - like footprints of the parting winter. Slanting cross, a pagan sign for fire in this context could be considered as a symbol of flying bird, the herald of Spring. But this would be just a simple, literary interpretation of the painting. Its substance seems much more profound. Blue space with compound green and red ones, encircled with black, tells us about implacability and inevitability of conflict and fight on the border of old and new.

Alexander Fedoseyev’s painting A Plant-filled Pond conveys certain mystic state of nature. Grand mass of blue, which is a group of trees at the foreground, occupies almost half of the canvas. But this doesn’t make the composition any heavier. That’s where the main pictorial event happens, which is a compound development of blue colors being picked up by openwork of falling shadows and continuing in the trees in the background as well as on the mirror-like surface of the pond and, finally, in the sky. The color develops not only technically, but emotionally. The artist creates a magic image that might have occurred in reality one bright sunny day.
The plant-filled pond is mysterious, it conceals something innermost. The author aims his artistic technique for creation of such an image. He doesn’t go to the skillfulness of diffuse brush or to the fine meticulous “done-ness”, though he’s able to do both perfectly well judging by his other works. As if reluctant to frighten off this state, he creates his textures carefully, sometimes working by pastose, sometimes by liquid transparent paint. Touching the canvas with soft brush he achieves the impression of velvety layer. This feeling of stirring, ineffable mystery reminds of the images of the Russian symbolists of the beginning of XX century, Pavel Kuznetsov and Victor Borisov-Musatov.