“I do not recognize the concept of ‘intellectual painting’”

The master has recently celebrated his 70th birthday. Sokolov is one of the brightest figures of the artistic brotherhood of Kyiv, thanks to not only his undeniable artistic talent, but also to his colorful appearance, which resembles that of a democratic intelligentsia of the 19th century, his bohemian spirit and his deep, expressive voice, which is immediately recognized in the crowd of every display in the city.

Love and art are the two wings that take a person above the barriers of worldly vanity and everyday life. Love is all-powerful: this force of nature is so dominant, that there has probably been no people that refrained from making their own songs of this great human feeling, eternally inherent in our species. The works of Mykola Sokolov show the immense love of life, the selfless love for art, and the fascination by the artistic exploration. The volcano of the artist’s emotions is reflected in temperamental, piquant, bold, and passionate figurative paintings of his, made in crazy shades-of-red color combinations, with a leitmotif imagery of beautiful Ukrainian women. These go in contrast to his urban abstractions, painted in pale gray-black palette and marked by a well-defined musical rhythm; or to his “Ladies in hats” and “Nude” series, complex in regards to tonal relationship; or to his landscapes and still lifes in watercolor, minimalist in utilizing means of expression, but extremely refined to the point at which they seem related to Japanese graphics.

At this exhibition, Sokolov quite peculiarly professes his love for Ukraine, which is now going through troubled times – with large-scale mystical and colorful paintings, created under the influence of Mykola Gogol’s imagery of Ukrainian novels. In Sokolov’s art, the healthy spirit and the beauty of folk female characters, who are cleverly painted as bright, cheerful, song-voiced symbols of the magical Ukraine, dreamt by Gogol, go in contrast to the images of devils, who represent modern embodiments of living evil, the enemy forces that create the absurd reality in which we, Ukrainians, have been forced to exist in recent years. In the age of tragic twilight of Ukraine, the artist creates his new paintings to laugh and mourn together with his brilliant namesake – Mykola Gogol.

Sokolov is an artist of many talents: monumentalist, painter, graphic artist, and a bearer of a recognizable and original artistic style in his figurative oil and tempera works – colorful, elegant, voluble, soaked in subtle associations.

Sokolov grew up among the icons and frescoes of 17th-century Orthodox churches in the Russian city of Yaroslavl; however, in 1976 he settled forever and pledged loyalty to another beautiful city of Yaroslav the Wise – Kyiv. In 1999-2000 he had the great honor and opportunity to work on the reconstruction of the monumental mosaics at the central dome of St. Michael’s Cathedral. He was able to handle such a high level of complexity thanks to the thorough professional education he received at the department of painting in Yaroslavl Art School (1961-67) and in the studio of monumental painting at Vera Mukhina Leningrad Higher Art and Industrial College (1971-76). His experience copying Dionysius’ frescoes of Ferapontov monastery, which he received during his studies in the famous “Mukhinka,” has undoubtedly become useful to the master in his work with the mosaics of St. Michael’s Cathedral in the very heart of Ukraine.

Sokolov’s teachers in the Leningrad College were G. Savinov, G. Rublev, A. Tambasov, K. Iohansen – the former students of world famous artists of the first third of the 20th century, such as K. Petrov-Vodkin, P. Filonov, A. Osmerkin – and they taught their students to avoid intentional visual effects, to eschew superficial plausibility, and to build art upon fine tonal relationships in order to create internal tension, which becomes a powerful means of visual expression. And this became a positive quality of Sokolov’s paintings, as he carefully builds up the composition by each stroke, like a mason who builds a wall of bricks; he strives for harmonious synthesis of color, image, form, and space. “Painting to me is neither arithmetic, nor logic. I do not recognize the concept of ‘intellectual painting.’ To me, painting is a subtle sense of color combinations and relationships, as natural as breathing. And also it is freedom and celebration. And more important is not what or who I am painting, but the figurative state of the object I’m painting. The portrait and the image are not the same thing,” Sokolov underlines the interview with a saying of his favorite teacher Gleb Savinov – one of the best students of Alexander Osmerkin. I think that this motto has contributed to the fact that works by Kyiv-based artist Mykola Sokolov are decorating Los Angeles Art Center (US), as well as numerous private collections in Austria, Australia, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, South Africa, and Japan.