CHAPTER I
TO BE BORN AN ARTIST
CHILDHOOD
The old saying that “a man’s fate depends on his character” can be applied to the creative output of Vladimir Fomin, born in Tomsk on January 14, 1963. His paintings reveal a personal world which entered his soul during childhood. If we consider the psychoanalytical theory about “man’s inner life,” which “beginning with the first breath, preserves all impressions forever,” Vladimir Fomin began his inner life at a very young age when his mother showed him picture albums about the art of the French impressionists. From age two to fourteen, Fomin constantly made various figurines out of play dough, hypnotized by the changeability and fragility of a material perfectly suited to rendering the momentary joys of youthful creativity. He decorated the play dough animals with multi-colored stripes and rhomboids, constantly tore pieces of paper, created collages, and colored them. He was quite serious about this creative task.
The first traces of genius, to borrow a phrase from the Russian poet Daniil Kharms, became evident in the fact that in his youth, Volodia was convinced he was like Leonardo and kept dreaming about becoming a magician. He wanted to surprise everybody. Because of this early insight into his own dreams, he developed creative coping mechanisms, springing from his active imagination, to deal with the ordinary life of a young boy in Communist Russia.
When in kindergarten someone approached me and complained that he had lost something at home, Vladimir mentions in one of his first recollections from his childhood, I would ask him not to be upset. Just wait, I told him, you’ll come home and the thing you lost will be on the table! And he would forget his problem and later it would seem to him that everything happened exactly as I told him. And I rarely had to fight when I was little. I could scare the offender by saying, for example, that he’ll grow a tail. Young Volodia looked everywhere for the “inexplicable” and, perhaps, for that reason loved to lie for hours in the grass and look at the clouds. He conjectured that fantasy contained a formula for beauty. Only many years later did he understand that even the simplest artistic craft requires development and rigorous discipline. But, as a child enrolled in kindergarten, he already possessed an innate, partially understood belief that art represented his connection to the Universe. He considered himself living in endless space. He used to say to himself: I’m alive! I live on the planet. I am glad that I was born and that I see and understand everything! And he repeated: Lord, but I just live once! Few people possess such spiritual and intellectual visions at so young an age; and when they do, they find a double-edged sword: the buoyancy of early self-knowledge is sometimes unacceptable to family members eager to raise a child who will succeed on society’s terms. At the age of ten, young Volodia copied famous portraits. The first was the portrait of Novikov by Levitskii. Rather than writing verses, he wrote poems. When at twelve he started painting icons using his own style but bearing the same title as the Orthodox canonical icons, such as St. George Vanquishing the Dragon, his father asked his young son to stop. His parents, natives of Tomsk who graduated from a Polytechnic Institute and worked as engineers in the secret military laboratories, as was common at the time, were Communists. Perhaps his father worried about Volodia for good reason, knowing that his son had inherited family talent– his great-grandmother and great-grandfather on his father’s side were icon painters in Kiev. And for that, in the first years of the Soviet power, they were exiled to Siberia.
You know, I belong to the party, and you’re painting icons. That’s not right, Nikolai Mikhailovich tried to explain to the youngster. However, overcoming his fears, Fomin’s father allowed his son to show his first “real,” picture-icon, St. George the Victorious,at an exhibition of children’s art at the Scientific Research Institute. Volodia felt proud because he had exhibited his first work earlier than Salvador Dali, who showed his first painting in his native Figueres at the age of fourteen.
Perhaps the inner world revealed by the boy who subconsciously (by killing the dragon) was fighting evil, would explain his subsequent “strange” actions; for instance, “going to the people” to primordial Central Russia. But this happened later, when the genes inherited from his ancestors doomed him to the life of an artistic hermit.
But in the beginning, it was his mother, Galina Vladimirovna, who opened his eyes to culture. She took her three children to museums and theatres, instilling in them a love of high culture. Later, when Vladimir became a well-known artist, she herself started painting. In the Fomin family everybody painted, except his father. Perhaps because talent was so abundant in his family, no relative ever considered Vladimir a genius, which for Fomin, who strongly believed in his gifts, created a spiritual abyss between him and even the family members closest to him. As happens often in life, career and the effort required to achieve success creates clashes even among the closest of friends. Ambition is a creative principle, and, just as likely, the apple of dissent. Even after more than thirty exhibitions, Fomin often complained sadly that the people closest to him had never congratulated him in connection with any of those exhibitions.
THE THIRD, “SUPERFLUOS” EYE
Volodia was the second child in the family. His elder brother, Sergei, reacted to the event with jealousy. One day, when their parents were away from home, he put the baby in a box and hid it in the pantry. Miraculously, their mother and father returned home in time, discovered and saved the almost-suffocated baby. As an adult, Vladimir tried to understand and articulate what sort of spiritual impact this incident had on him. It was as if I was in the wilderness and talked to the Buddha. Listening in complete darkness to the beating of my heart, I comprehended the beating of God’s heart, I was even laughing at pharaohs laid in their tombs with all their gold adornments. I understood Alexander the Great who was buried with his empty hands sticking out from his coffin. After that I could not live a material life.
Fomin came to believe that the final result of his ordeal was the development of a “third eye.” An ordinary man sees the world as chaotic, while he experienced an analytical vision of completeness, the controllability of the world. It was a perception of Providence which has stayed with him throughout his life. And yet, the ordeal in the pantry took a toll on the boy’s health – in his childhood he suffered from claustrophobia. From time to time, he had seizures – fell into puddles and screamed. In the first grade, when angry, he stomped his feet under his desk.
LEFTY
Before going to school, Volodia was afraid only of closed spaces. He was not angry at anyone. He went to school with a feeling that everything was a game in which he had no match. In the first grade he was already able not only to draw but to write with his left hand, but his teachers him forced to use his right hand for letters and numbers. He was not forbidden to draw with his left hand because drawing was considered the least important subject.
Once, when the students were given an assignment to paint a fir tree with watercolors, Vladimir, who had left his paint brush at home, drew the tree with his finger. He added light and shadow. The result was better than the efforts of the other students. He received a B. Nobody was ever given an A. Because these teachers were not artists, but employees of the state, the grades in this subject were assigned by a group of teachers. According to their long-practiced theory, every student in the art class was as good as any other. After that, his parents and the teachers noticed in the cheerful boy episodes of lack of balance and aggression. Outside of drawing, which was taught until the sixth grade, Volodia found no other interest.
He did none of his homework in any of his subjects, coming to the conclusion that in school he was misunderstood and his teachers weren’t exactly “Tarkovskiis” or “Rublevs.” He only willingly participated on designing the student bulletin board. In the seventh grade, his parents terminated Volodia’s fascination with play dough and paints, which they believed were inappropriate for a fourteen-year old adolescent. However, the family had great respect for “Shishkins” and “Aivazovskiis” and advised the boy to copy the masters “loved by the people.”
Unlike his brothers, who were permitted to finish a Children’s Art School, the middle son, at his parents’ request, finished a Music School. From the second grade Volodia had sung in a choir and studied how to play the balalaika. Having performed at one of his school’s evening performances the songs Kalinka-malinka and In the Orchard, In the Garden, he became a laughing stock of his classmates. Later, he would pick up the instrument only after drinking with boys from the higher grades. With them, he would strum the balalaika and sing enthusiastically. He was simply enchanted by music. As a teenager, he made electric guitars, sawing the cut wood, assembling the guitar and finishing it himself. In the ninth grade he held temporary jobs. He helped build a hospital, carrying sacks with concrete weighing 50 kilos—just to buy a tape recorder. He preserved this intimate relationship with music all his life. All his works are painted to the accompaniment of some musical composition.
In the ninth grade Fomin saw Moscow for the first time. He lived in a dormitory at the Moscow Architectural Institute, where one of his acquaintances studied. The Portuguese, Chileans, and Africans who lived in the dorm were surprised by the Siberian’s ability to prepare food out of anything that was available. The journey to the capital coincided with the Olympic Games of 1980, but Volodia preferred excursions to museums rather than to sport venues.
I spent ten years of school, Fomin recalled, trying not to distinguish myself in any way. The teachers considered me a below average student, but then, their delight was to humiliate. After I finished school, it was converted to a special one for mentally handicapped students, even though I always felt that I had long been a student at a ”school for fools.” For thirteen years after graduation, years that flew by in an instant, I had one and the same dream: I am a student of the School No. 36. How can it be? I already finished the school! I already received my diploma! Why am I sitting at a desk? Even dreaming, I understood that it was impossible. I kept explaining this to everybody, kept asking to be released. I would wake up drenched in cold sweat.”
BABA KATTIA AND HER GOD
Out of all Volodia’s grandmothers, grandfathers, and other elder relatives, he knew only his great-aunt, Baba Katia – the sister of his mother’s mother. Out of everything she had lived through, she remembered only her childhood. She was born in 1913 in a family of a worker who had to provide food for six. People lived better under the tsar, she would insist. We had everything: meat, bread on the table, and shoes, and clothes. Everything will come back, she promised, and your Lenin will not be there, and the Soviet power will not be there. Because God exists and communism doesn’t.
Her soul belonged to God and to the Church. She would say to the young pioneer Vova, You’re a fool; you don’t understand anything. For example, you don’t believe in God. Just wait, when I die, I’ll visit you and you will see me after my death. Vova laughed and called her a madwoman. And she called everybody, starting with the generation of his parents, Antichrists.
Nevertheless, the boy was drawn to the church. Like everything forbidden, the faces of saints and the crosses seemed curiously attractive. He looked fearfully at the church when he went to buy fish food in the pet store across the street. Once he convinced his fifth-grade friend to approach the altar. He remembered the angry grumbles of old women – on his friend’s neck was a red pioneer necktie. He had to take it off. Volodia carried his own in his pocket – where he would hide it immediately after stepping out of school.
Baba Katia came to him the day after her funeral. She stood next to Volodia’s bed and smiled.
Come with me, she said, it’s so nice here.
Thirteen-year-old Volodia did not understand in which world he saw Baba Katia, in his dreams or in reality. Perhaps at that moment he started believing in another life – beyond the edge of death. He recognized the mighty power of dream and imagination. Myth entered his life forever – the border between the present and the past was erased. Volodia was convinced that death existed so the old may appear new. A man is born and everything in the world seems new to him. Lord God is not interested in the point at which man becomes disappointed in life: God is the future and the past. Man is the present because in the present man he is his own choice.
We don’t create anything, we only extract, Fomin liked to repeat. But the artist was not able to make his choice immediately.
ALMOST A MADMAN
His parents’ desire to find for Volodia a place in life knew no bounds. Under their influence he entered various educational institutions – a banking technical school, a pedagogical institute with specialization in physics and mathematics, an electronic-technical school, a topography school, and even a sewing school. After a day or several months he would withdraw his enrollment because every school left upon him a visible feeling of disappointment. In the breaks between schools he worked as a computer programmer at the Institute of Atmospheric Optics, as a metal craftsman of measuring apparatuses, and as an electrician at three factories. But the dream of entering an art school remained.
However, the student and young worker was facing an unavoidable future – the army. The obligation to comply made him insane. Should he cross out two-to-three years of life serving in some construction battalion? Should he dig and build? It would be the same as going to prison. In the army office he was offered a chance to enroll in the Tomsk Telecommunication School, after graduation from which one could serve as a communication specialist beyond the polar circle or, after getting married, stay and work in Tomsk. Friends advised, if you join the army, you might as well hang yourself. They broke their own hands and legs just to save themselves from army service.
Volodia systematically studied psychiatry and eventually checked himself into a psychiatric hospital. A doctor from the hospital made the desired diagnosis because to the question, What do you want from life? Volodia consistently answered, I want to paint autumn like nobody before me has painted it. Thirteen years later, he painted this picture and gave it the title Autumn: A Gift to Leo Swemp. When he finally received his long-awaited “white ticket” (exemption), which saved him from the army, he was only nineteen years old.
CREATIVE FEVER
In 1982, Fomin’s father, Nikolai Mikhailovich, gave up his hope of making something out of his son, who was still interested only in drawing and seemed unfit for anything else. He proposed to his son that he enter the Evening Art School, where one of his work colleagues studied. Volodia successfully passed the exams and entered the classes of T. Gudzenko and N. Belianov, who later became well-known in Moscow art circles. At the same time, he did not miss even one of the classes taught by others, which resulted in a triple dose of homework. He was the last to leave the school at 11 p.m., going home to a wooden house with a stove, inherited from Baba Katia. All he wanted to do after coming home from school was to paint, to sit at his easel. And he kept working on still-lifes and portraits until three in the morning.
At dawn he went to work. In order to pay for his evening studies, the nineteen-year-old Fomin worked during the day as a lab technician at the Scientific Research Institute of Automatics and Electronics, and occasionally as a truck loader. When he was twenty, he found a job at the ball bearing factory as an artist-designer, a year later went to do the same job at the rubber shoe factory, one year after that became a nurse in a birth clinic, and again a loader in a pharmacy warehouse.
AN INNOCULATION AGAINST SOCIALISM
The period of combined study of the basics of art and working as an artist-designer had an indisputable impact on the formation of Fomin’s world outlook. He came to the ball-bearing factory as a young man doubting himself, believing that without a special education he would not be able to compete with the many factory artists-designers. He became the fifth artist under the head artist of the factory, whose section was directly supervised by the party organizer – the main representative of the government ideology. Each factory shop had its own artists-designers. After two months Vladimir realized that he could make banners, displays of distinction, and bulletin boards better than the others. Once, he made a board featuring the members of the Politbureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. A party boss who came from the Tomsk regional party committee became offended because the board at the regional committee offices was inferior, and he calmly removed the board and took it with him. The board from the regional office was brought to replace the factory one and the workers were indignant for several days.
The artists at the factory were never considered the heroes of socialist labor because they were all incorrigible drunks, whose amoral behavior – being arrested and held until they sobered up, cheating on their wives, everyday tardiness for work – was often the subject at the meetings of the party and professional committees. All the workers from the factory who wanted to drink a bottle and not be seen by their shop bosses came to the workshop, where one could enjoy simple snacks from the table. Towards the middle of the day Fomin’s colleagues from the section, including with the head artist, whose salary as an engineering-technical worker was less than his charges who were paid the workers’ salaries, were so smashed that they couldn’t walk, wrote advertisements containing two letters e or three letters o in a row, fell off of their stools and passed out.
Once Vladimir told his boss that he was no artist at all. The boss threw a weight at him. Fomin ducked and the weight hit the head of his co-worker, who fell and started crying that nobody respected him - they only threw junk at him. Everybody laughed.
During the night shifts, when the factory was getting ready for celebrations or demonstrations, the section received incentives up to 400 rubles. Normally, Vladimir was paid a salary of one hundred-thirty rubles, out of which ninety was spent on his studies at the Evening Art School.
The factory’s party organizer’s attitude towards Fomin, who did not drink or smoke, revealed his belief that he was a master at reeducating ideologically unreliable workers. Vladimir understood that at the factory the most important thing was to walk through the entrance on time. If one arrived on time, it was possible then to do nothing at all, or work at a snail’s pace. But, he was chronically late, even though he finished his work on time and completely. Regardless of that, the party organizer and the door guards kept watch for him daily at the entrance, which the young man passed running, or at the holes in the fence, so big that through one a car could have driven.
Unlike the rest of the worry-free artists-designers, Fomin did not consider himself to be the child of socialism. He also never wanted to belong to the privileged caste of the artists supported by the government, even though after graduating from the Evening Art School he studied for a year with one of those meritorious art workers, a member of the Union of the Soviet Artists, P. Iusipov, who was personally given a studio by the secretary of the Tomsk District Committee of the party.
Vladimir has retained an unfriendly attitude to that time, considering it something incomplete. The existing state system did not provide continuation – there was no artist milieu, there were no private galleries and no collectors. Everything centered on the artists organizing shows for each other. The more diplomas from higher educational institutions, titles, and state commissions they had, the more possibilities they had to organize their personal exhibitions. The well-informed public, which actively participated in such venues, looked at the paintings, but did not buy anything. Later Fomin would paraphrase the Polish director K. Zanussi: In art, the majority always has bad taste. And in this sense the elite is more important than the masses.
For Vladimir, there was still only one goal, to make for himself a name as great as Picasso or van Gogh. From 1984 to 1986, five times, without success, he tried to enter various professional art schools. He often conducted one-sided conversations with the portraits of the great artists hanging on his Russian stove while he sketched. Inspired by the scientific and classical literature of the world, by the albums with the works of the masters at which he looked in libraries, he felt tormented. How could he work out his own style, unique, his own, and unlike all others?
THE QUESTION OF FAITH
Fomin learned early from books that the most difficult thing in the world is to sell a painting. When Eduard Munch waited in vain for his first buyer, shaken to the core of his genius, this was exactly what Munch’s father told him. Salvador Dali, who painted his first work when he was ten, had to wait at least as long to sell his first painting. For that reason Fomin expected to reach his goal – to become an acknowledged genius – only towards the end of his artistic life, which would be simultaneous with his real life. The crucified Christ seemed to him the best example of human time. To achieve his goal of having his name synonymous with true art, he was ready to sacrifice, but he also feared selling out. Creativity is a question of faith, he decided once and for ever.
THE FINGER OF GOD
Learning how to paint and working in Tomsk, Fomin abandoned his native Penates several times. He studied the applied arts of the Finno-Ugric people of Siberia and the North, mastered his skills with the craftsmen around the Kama River and the Urals. He wandered through the churches of the Golden Ring, served as an apprentice to art restorers, gained knowledge of Moscow, Novgorod, and Jaroslav icon painting. Sometimes he made money for food by painting designs around windows and gates in the villages of Central Russia.
In 1984, Vladimir, unfamiliar with the requirements for admittance to the Kemerov and Krasnoiarsk art schools, tried to submit his documents at the same time to the examination committees of both institutions. As it turned out, the schools only accepted candidates who had just graduated from the eighth grade, while Fomin had finished a 10-year school. The next year he applied to the art school in Jaroslav, but again did not get accepted because of his age. At 23, in 1986, he went to Suzdal. In the local art school, in the department of restoration, to which the young man, fascinated by icons was drawn, he was asked for a document proving that he had at least a year of museum experience.
The artist was forced to go to Ivanovo, where he was admitted to art school without any problem. That night he celebrated his admission with other lucky entrants, but learned the next day that he had been placed into a design course, not into a painting course, despite passing the painting course exams.
Considering himself exclusively a painter, Vladimir got on a bus and went to Kostroma, from where he planned to take a train to Tomsk. On the bus, he talked to a stranger who advised him to check out the village Krasnoe on the Volga, about 40 kilometers from Kostroma. After returning to Tomsk, Vladimir literally had a revelation – he remembered that before his trip to Suzdal he had paged through a booklet for university applicants with the addresses of art schools. The first page he saw after opening the booklet was about the Krasnoselskoe School of Artistic Metal Work. He imagined at once the village, the school, himself sitting next to a wooden house at his easel, painting the Volga and the birch trees. And this vision was to come true.
Fomin arrived in Kostroma late in the evening, when the buses to the village Krasnoe had stopped running. He set out on foot, walking all night to the school through the forest filled with wild animals – wolves, bears, and elks. He tried unsuccessfully to wave down passing cars. Later, he learned that at that time bandits had been attacking the drivers. He remembered the road, with its aromatic grasses, with the stars providing light. After a short nap on the side of the road, around seven in the morning, he finally made it to the doors of the best known institution for artist-jewelers in the country.
After meeting Fomin, the stern woman director attentively listened to the story of entrance attempts made by the twenty-three-year-old man and of his passionate dream of becoming a true artist. Then she suggested that he rest a little on a cot in the graduate dormitory. Unfortunately, she said, you are late. Everybody has already taken the exams and we won’t accept anyone else. But later, at 12 o’clock the same day, an astonished Vladimir found his name on the bulletin board of the dormitory – the director had added his name in pen to the typed list of the students accepted to the Krasnoselskoe School.
Realizing that almost all of his future classmates had applied to this institution after long consideration rather than spontaneously, Vladimir felt unbelievably happy. Then, remembering that he had not eaten for forty-eight hours, he bought some sausage, went to a field, lay in the rye, and experienced wondrous satisfaction looking at the blue sky. It seemed that the doors of the Gods were finally open.
If I had found myself in some other school, Vladimir later told hundreds of journalists from various countries – I would not be the artist I am now. In the village of Krasnoe on the Volga the teachers did not stick to the academic method, they tended to favor monumentality. We were taught to work with watercolors, not with oils, which I used every day after classes. Also, drawing was not taught in the academic style, which for me, who considered myself only a primitivist, was fine. I even think like a primitivist. No other style in art permits such flights of imagination, or allows one to realize himself in the endless search for new forms.
In that school I learned how to feel plasticity and line, and I embraced the pronounced decorativeness and ornamentation used in creating metal objects, including jewelry. At the foundation of the style I invented was the patterned surface of the arabesque. Man is ornamental and because all the ornaments are derived from a line and a point, man is the starting point for the creation of unpredictable variations.
My lubok even has an effect taken from the cloisonné enamel. One can say that my manner of painting was formed from my professional knowledge as an artist-jeweler. And yet, one cannot be taught the things I did in one school. When I finished all my art classes, I had to learn to draw again – to invent my own style.
Fomin made frequent train trips from Kostroma to Moscow and St. Petersburg, where he was astonished by the canvasses of the masters in the Tretiakov Gallery, Pushkin Museum, and the Hermitage. He also wandered among the statues of the Summer Garden and the fountains of Peterhof.
In 1998, at the exhibition in the Jewelry School, the second-year student Fomin showed his Country Fair – his first graphic work in his style, later called by the specialists “Fomin’s avant-garde lubok.” It did not feature the brightness of colors characteristic of lubok. But it did, without doubt, show traces of the stylistic discoveries of the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, as well as elements of neoprimitivism, surrealism, and Finno-Ugric ornament.
Country Fair marked the end of one stage of learning and the beginning of the Lubok series, devoted to childhood, street celebrations, and carnival images. But at first, the teachers at the school insisted that I could not have created such a picture by myself, and kept asking Who did you snag it from?
They did not believe me and I understood that apparently I had done something praiseworthy, he remembered. My desire to develop this stylistic tendency in my works was so strong that returning in the evening from school to my little house with its stove, I kept asking God to give me an opportunity to create something unique. Once, I had a dream that I was at my one-man show, which, for some reason took place in the gym of my school in Tomsk. I walked around but could not understand anything: the pictures sparkled with yellow, red, and green paints, so bright that they could not be found in nature. I was astounded: Am I really going to paint like that? After all, I was taught something completely opposite – to blend the colors and render space three-dimensionally... In short, I decided to resurrect the lubok, forgotten in Russia, by modernizing it in my style. And the dream turned true when I discarded all the rules I was taught, crossing over to everything labeled forbidden.
In his third year, Fomin exhibited at the district show in the Kostroma Art Museum. One of the teachers, whose work was not accepted by the art advisory committee, blamed Vladimir for his own failure and began to give him low grades in drawing. Fomin, who was eager not only to do his homework but to help his class colleagues with sketches, instead earned for himself quite a few jealous competitors. He became close only to one of the local intellectuals, Nikolai. Their relationship worked as follows: the honorable and good Nikolai, after graduating from the school in the village of Krasnoe, where he was born, and teaching drawing in the same school, complained to Vladimir: I cannot do things the way you do. I even don’t know what to draw except the combine drivers and men with scythes. But in my childhood I was a promising artist, judging by the drawings under my bed. Vladimir felt sorry for Nikolai because the very milieu in which the teacher lived and worked contributed to decline and confusion.
If Anton Chekhov in one of his stories compared Tomsk to a pig (the town is grey, the men are drunks, and the women are ugly), Fomin compared both Kostroma and the village of Krasnoe with Tomsk. From early morning until evening the men crowded the store that sold vodka. After so many drinks that they started squealing like pigs, they fell down into puddles and oink there with their red pimply noses. Vladimir’s class leader did not find anything immoral in lying drunk around the women’s toilet in the dormitory. The village women led loose lives and the children swore from a young age. Worse yet, Nikolai was married to the director of the school, one of those women who hate everybody who is better at anything than they and their husbands. She constantly kicked Vladimir out of her class.
Many students led quite an idle life, and some of them used their knowledge to become rich at the state’s expense. The students were taught to become not only specialists working in jewelry factories, but also for the St. Petersburg mint, which produced Soviet money. In the village of Krasnoe on the Volga there was a case where a family of students, classmates of Fomin, got so involved in printing paper money from a self-made matrix that they forgot to take safety precautions. Someone who visited them at home saw the bank notes drying on the laundry line and reported them to the appropriate authorities. The father of the family was shot, the mother received a life-term in prison, and their child was sent to an orphanage. Vladimir was greatly affected by this event. When he received his engraver’s diploma in 1989 and returned to Tomsk, he threw away his box containing the instruments for making silver and gold jewelry and forever forgot about the acquired skills of a “money” master. The KGB had conducted searches looking for the presence of such instruments in possession of the graduates of the Krasnoselskoe School.
The fact that Fomin left the school in 1998, just a year short of becoming an artist-jeweler, was a surprise to everybody but himself. The people around understood that by quitting school he rejected an official career. There was one reason: the artist felt the destruction of the socialist system, felt outside of his time, in some alternate dimension. But he had found himself. He wanted to paint pictures day and night in his discovered style.
FOLLOWING CHESTNIAKOV
Before locking himself up voluntarily in his Tomsk house for three years, where besides the stove, a wooden bed, and the easel there was noting else, and doing it with one goal in mind, to become a Master, Fomin went to Moscow. He was not thinking about entering the Russian Academy of Painting and Sculpture founded by Ilia Glazunov. The beginning artist wanted to show his paintings at any cost and be judged by the acclaimed master. One with natural talent or talent given by God has to paint, said Glazunov when he met Fomin and added that six years of studies in the Academy would only spoil the talent of the self-created lubok artist.
By an irony of fate, similar advice was given by Ilia Repin, a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy, as he sent to Kostroma District the self-taught lubok artist E. Chestniakov, whose “naïve” canvasses Fomin later admired in Kostroma Museum. The rainbow of wild colors this village magician used for painting fairs, amusements, and celebrations, enchanted Fomin and reminded him of those he saw in his prophetic dream.
