Beauty Saved The Journalist
The Atheist and His Soul — such unusual title was given to a one man show opened in the presence of many representatives of the Dnipropetrovsk creative intelligentsia at the local Students’ Palace Gallery. Its author, Leonid Hamolsky, is a man of many gifts: renowned journalist and chief editor of the oblast Zoria [Dawn] newspaper, a publicist with long experience, and now, as it becomes obvious, also an artist who started his artistic career under rather unusual circumstances.
This spring Leonid became seriously ill. To distract himself from dark thoughts, still in the hospital, he started painting small sketches and pictures in watercolor and oil. All of them depicted the same site, St. Nicholas Chapel at the Monastery Island on the Dnipro. Later the artist proceeded with painting landscapes in the open. Now he has made around forty of them. It is hard to tell what exactly influenced him so much, the beauty of the nature or the extraordinary energy of the island, where, according to legend, monks have lived a thousand years. Anyway, soon he started to recover.
“There are important periods in everyone’s life when you, willing or not, start to isolate yourself from the petty details of everyday life,” says Hamolsky. “And then you turn to eternal matters. What’s the name of these eternal matters? God? Soul? Beauty? Everybody decides this for himself.”
Be that as it may, the light of creativity did not fall on the Zoria editor-in-chief by accident. His mother and grandmother made skillful embroideries in silk, which are preserved in the local museum. Hamolsky’s uncle, P. P. Belousov, was People’s Artist of USSR. The artist himself graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk College of the Arts and used to paint theater decorations for that same Students’ Palace where his first one man show opened forty years later.
It would not be Leonid Hamolsky, with his customary sense of humor, if he failed to add some pepper to his painting. One of the pictures, Memories of a California Prisoner, caused a true sensation at the exhibition. It depicts a strong man and delicate woman standing next to the St. Nicholas Chapel against the background of a cloudy fall or winter sky. The author himself, smiling mysteriously, declined to comment on this work, giving scope for the Dnipropetrovsk art lovers’ imagination.
And perhaps not only them. As head of the local branch of the National Journalists’ Union of Ukraine Svitlana Zaraiska informed the audience at the vernissage, Leonid Hamolsky’s wonderful paintings will be exhibited at the Union’s Kyiv office (27 Khreshchatyk) as soon as in December.
