about the artist
• I date the beginning of my painting practice and study by the year of 1965 – in my 21. At that time I was a student, learning languages, diplomacy and other sciences in the Moscow Institute of International Relations. Soon, after working in Embassy in the Sudan (1967) and then in Syria, I preferred, since 1970, to teach language at the same Institute – in order to devote more time and attention to painting and drawing exercises. I managed to proceed with that line even during my short visits to Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait and my directorship of the Russian Cultural Center in Cairo (1993-95), where I built a kind of studio.
• But at the very beginning I took courses at Surikov Institute studios in Moscow (1973-74), then at Repin Academy studios and Mukhina Art Institute in St. Petersburg (1976). Being a young artist, then I made a race of exhibition participations with getting diplomas, presentations and purchases here and abroad, and was admitted to the Young Painters’ Association of Moscow Art Union (1975). It was very interesting and useful period when I contacted with famous Russian painters – Aleksandr Labas and Tatiana Yablonskaya, and all those years painted at Artists’ House in Sednev on the river Snov, Ukraine.
• Generally, my art involvement began during the school years, but then I was fully fascinated with poetry and drawing. So that on graduating the secondary school in 1963 I had dozen of poems and one personal exhibition of drawings. That exhibition exposed a kind of plasticity and rhythms, which first had appeared in my sketches done from the board of the “Anton Chekhov” steamer in 1960, when I rushed to draw the banks, churches and ships on the rivers Volga and Kama ( www.symchromism.com/graf/s3.php ).
I suppose that, as an artist, I've awaked on the board of that steamer, in my 16, traveling with my mother by the rivers Volga and Kama.
• The poetry of life attitudes, which makes us artists, is a thing which we inherit. Thus, I was surprised how near I could be with my father, first of all in the vision of life and then in the drawing, when, after his death, I found two notebooks with about hundred of father’s sketches which he made at the fronts of the World War I in 1915-17, where he was taken to from the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University ( www.symchromism.com/fam01/index_1.php ).
• So, I began to practice the painting after a period of drawing, which I continued side by side with the painting. I am sure the drawing and life sketches enrich the painting with plasticity, movement and innovations.
• More than this: life sketches so much influence our painting and our vision as a whole, that I often associate it with Walt Whitman’s poetry.
• On the other hand, color is as near to me as music. And I look at every new and compound color gamut and harmonious composition like at a mute symphony. Out of this, I call my painting method: “symchromy” or the “symchromism”.
Go to Yuri Kudryavtsev-Dobrohotov's Studio to find out more.
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