Many shades of black and white

Exhibition of Anatolii Devianin’s graphics has opened at the Galagan Chernihiv Regional Art Museum. The exhibits have been provided by Chernihiv art collector Ruslan Perekucha. Devianin used various artistic techniques.

His works are emotive, sophisticated and full of feeling, regardless of whether it is a book illustration sketch or a landscape. Having served at the frontlines from the first to the last day of the German-Soviet war, the artist reflected in his sketches and drawings what he had seen and lived through in the wartime. He created a hundred satirical drawings for army newspapers and leaflets, as well as many portraits of war veterans. Discharged from the army in 1949, Devianin returned to Kyiv and continued to work as book artist, designing books by local and foreign writers, including Vitaly Zakrutkin, Wanda Wasilewska, Jerzy Broszkiewicz, and Vasil Bykaw.

He sought to identify the essence of a literary work, to convey its mood and its characters’ feelings. He reaffirmed his unflinching affection for the war topics by designing and illustrating Bykaw’s novella Third Rocket (1963) and The Last Match (1964) by Pyotr Severov and Naum Khalemsky. One admires the beauty of peaceful nature when looking at Devianin’s landscapes Seascape (1946), The House at the Lake (1970s), and Landscape with a Tree (1970s). The artist used a variety of creative techniques and materials, including autolithography, watercolor, gouache, sanguine, felt pen, and charcoal pencil.