Winter mood at Art-Donbass

About 200 paintings and graphic pictures of the snow-covered landscapes of Ukrainian villages, forests, streets and squares, portraits and winter still lifes by artists from Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Sloviansk, and Kyiv – this time the Art-Donbass gallery welcomes the year’s cold season with the Winter Mood exhibit. One of the halls has gathered the winter stories of not only the authors who are well known in and outside Ukraine, such as People’s Painters Polina Shakalo, Oleksii Poliakov, and Hryhorii Tyshkevych, Meritorious Figures of Art Borys Yeriomin, Valentyna and Volodymyr Telychko, Hennadii Zhukov, and Serhii Smetankin, but also young authors, students of the Donetsk Art School and the Donbas National Academy of Construction and Architecture.

Incidentally, many of the beginners painted their pictures special for this exhibit. The Consul of the Czech Republic in Donetsk, Petr Richter, said: “Some pictures make you feel cold, others instill a New Year mood, and some express certain mildness. I personally liked Thank You, God, a picture by the young artist Tetiana Vezeleva, for its naivety and a particular Ukrainian cordiality. And it also warmed my heart when I saw a picture of Prague’s Old City Square by the artist Melanii.” Many works were executed in the open air, which is not so easy to do when the outside temperature is 10-20 degrees below zero. The exhibit also displays a wide variety of genres, visions, and entirely different artistic techniques of the Kyiv, Donetsk, and Lviv schools in which the artists once studied. Besides, on December 12 the Art-Donbass art and exhibition complex launched a project, “Pottery,” organized in conjunction with the pottery studios Phoenix, Donetsk Earthenware, and Good Circle in Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, and Kurakhove. The Winter Mood exhibit will remain open until January 10, 2014.