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New Exhibits for the Museum collection

The collection of the State M.A. Sholokhov Museum-Reserve was filled up with paintings by Serghey Gavrilyachenko, the Honoured Artist of Russia, professor of the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov, Secretary of the Artists’ Union of Russia.

Gavrilyachenko is often called a Cossack artist. Most of his canvases are about Cossacks, the beauty of the Don country and its people. Born in 1956, in a town of Shakhti the Rostov Region, in the country of the Don Cossack Army, the painter deeply feels his ties of his forefathers’ life and experience.

The master’s art of painting is noted for a composition variety, plot diversity, aspiration for historic truth. His view of the subject is quite original.

A small-sized canvas of “An Attack” shows a horse-rider rushing along at the viewer. A wiry, well-built figure is clad in a field shirt, blue riding-breeches with stripes; he is wearing a red-banded blue service cap with a cockade. A sunny steppe, a dust raised by horse hooves mixed with the afternoon mirage making the metal of the sky harder. Attack. The Cossacks are rushing at the enemy…

One plot is the most frequent in the works of Serghey Alexandrovich, it is a farewell of a Cossack leaving his home.

The painter could render a rich spectre of emotions: sorrow of parting, fear of the old parents, that though their son may be safe and sound to come back home, he may fail to see them alive. A romantic excitement of a boy holding a lance in his hand. A childbirth nest, close relatives.

Behind the wattle fence there is a vast steppe with chalky mountains in the horizon. A Cossack is offered his last, bitter farewell drink, which is going to be followed by an uncertainty of his lot.

Nataliya Tishchenko