CHAPTER 3
RECOGNITION
THE VEPSA SERIES
In Karelia, Fomin revealed himself as an artist and accomplished what he strove for. The national series he created – Vepsa, Kizhi, and Kalevala – are a pictorial bouquet of fairy tales. The first Vepsa motifs used throughout the series appeared already in Tomsk in 1991 (Deer and Boar). Working on the sketches to the series devoted to the cults of the ancient Vepsa and partially Karela people, he had already known the Vepsa jewelry tradition from the Hermitage collection and the common elements in the rituals, beliefs, and applied arts of the Northern peoples, particularly Khanty and Mansi.
In Petrozavodsk, he became acquainted with various resources found in the annex of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the National Library and bookstores. According to the tradition which had taken root in our family, I read aloud and Fomin indicated where the page should be earmarked or the text underlined. My husband was interested in the local folklore, conserved in museums and preserved in the memory of the inhabitants of the Vepsa and Karela villages. Two such villages – Rybreka and Sheltozero he visited officially, riding an official black Volga in the company of the representatives from the Executive Council of the Republic. According to their plan, Volodia was supposed to give a painting to the Sheltozero Ethnographic Museum which has more than three thousand Vepsa items. But he did not want to part with his baby. Like E. Munch, he liked to repeat: I don’t have any other children but my pictures. And afterwards he was not sorry; several years later the newspapers reported that village peasants had robbed the museum.
He liked that the symbol of the word Vepsa is related to the symbolic image of Christ – a fish. In general, he was drawn to mysticism and appreciated my Zodiac sign – Pisces. The Vepsa are the only Baltic people who preserved their ancient name derived from a trade sign “vepsa”: a triangle (dorsal fin) with a little circle inside (fish eye). Fomin found out that the material and spiritual culture of the Vepsa people was strongly influenced by Russians and other foreigners. But because of the uniqueness of the external milieu, which created the history of the “vanished” civilization by encircling it and fighting with it, the ancient Vepsa people made some unique discoveries in art.
Perhaps people who live in Karelia, remarked Fomin in an interview, don’t notice anything interesting in the “treasures” of their ancient cultures. In contrast, I am astonished by the spaces opened to my mind. In the triptych “Shaman’s Dream” I was able to unite reality and fantasy. This formulation – “reality and fantasy” became the motto to the entire creative output of the artist, the same way as his bright palette became an inseparable part of the canvasses filled with symbolic themes and compositions.
It took three years to create more than 40 graphics and paintings of the Vepsa series. In the opinion of the French scholars who studied the culture and languages of the Finno-Ugric people and published their animalistic compositions in a prominent academic journal, the series became a real sensation on the crossroads between science and art. German TV channel 1-ARD produced a film about the series on the island of Kizhi, where the artist lived in the summer of 1994. The film left on him a strange impression about the cinematographic techniques. He was forced to pose against the Kizhi churches, standing at his easel up to his waist in tall grasses and painting The Vepsa People Came to Us.
The excitement caused by the series was so strong that the journal of the Russian Government, Life of Nationalities, and the Finnish press wrote about the acquisition of a part of the series by the Finnish National Museum of Hunting and Fishing in the city of Riihimaki even before the artist had his personal exhibition there in 1995.
In the summer of 1994, one of the tourist agencies organized a special tour called “Champagne with a Famous Person.” One day, a bus with the workers of the American Consulate stopped in front of our home. At that time we lived in a pretty bad part of the city, like Harlem in New York. For a long time the Americans were afraid to get out of the bus, but, after entering our apartment, hearing a lecture by the English-speaking interpreter about the art of my husband, and tasting the champagne, they started showing animated interest in the paintings. After their departure, we discovered that two paintings had vanished without a trace. That was the last time we entertained for the tourist agencies!
That summer, Fomin talked to and was photographed with the American Consul, T. Pickering, on the island of Kizhi. To commemorate this meeting, the family of the consul received the tiny Steamships painted by the artist, and a personal exhibition was arranged in the Consulate in Moscow in December of 1994. At the exhibit, as well as at the second one in the Consulate in May of 1995, the Vepsa series was shown together with the series Political, Lubok, and Gifts. In the future, the grateful lubok master will not forget to invite Pickering, the chairman of the Boeing company, to his exhibition at the Albin Polasek Museum in Florida.
For almost fifteen years after the exhibition of Mikhail Shemiakin and before Fomin’s show in 1994, no Russian artist was invited to present his works at the American Consulate. For that reason, Vladimir wanted very much to see his compatriots – art specialists and journalists -- at his second exhibition in this prestigious place. But the unexpected happened. The opening was set for the day of celebration of the Soviet victory over the Germans. The President of the United States, Bill Clinton, came to Moscow to participate in the national event and, for that reason, stronger security measures were introduced. The opening of Fomin’s exhibit was postponed from the 9th of May to the 19th. Due to a mix-up resulting from the new security measures, all the Russians who had been invited to the opening at the Consulate were not admitted. An acquaintance of the artist, V. Gritsuk, a photojournalist from the journal Rodina (Motherland), an organ of the Russian government, complained that he and the main editor of the journal were not allowed to get in even though they represented one of the major publications of the country. If it hadn’t been for V. Meiland, who miraculously sneaked inside the Consulate thanks to some people he knew, Fomin would have had to drink champagne exclusively in the company of Americans. Fomin met Meiland in 1993, when he was the main critic of the Russian Artists’ Union. In 1994, the critic presented the artist with his collection of poetry, which featured the following lines:
Meaning of talent? Never to betray it.
So when I’m told that something did not happen,
Or suddenly ceased to grow and now is dying,
I say that talent is a battering ram,
Used not to knock,
But break walls down.
In the same year, thanks to Meiland, who at that time was the main expert of the publishing enterprise of the Central House of Artists – ARTINFO - and the information agency ITAR-TASS, which represented in Russia the International Computer Bank of Art, with the center in New York, included Fomin among the top one hundred Russian geniuses and among the ten best contemporary artists. We learned about Fomin’s presence in the Bank from an interview on the first channel of Russian TV. For several years ARTINFO published and distributed throughout the world a number of computer discs popularizing the art of many artists, including my husband. Since then, literally hundreds of Russian and foreign Internet galleries and sites (for instance, World Art Network and Saatchi Gallery) have asked Volodia to collaborate, but we found ourselves unable to keep up and renew the information in virtual space.
One of the projects of Meiland, who organized his own firm Art-Manege in the Manezh building in the center of Moscow, was an exhibit in the German town of Cochem-Brauheck in the Kuhnhenne Gallery in November 1995. This exhibit was followed by three more, all of which acquainted the viewers with the Vepsa series.
Fomin’s show in the Petrozavodsk annex of the Moscow Commerce Bank “Vozrozhdenie” (which had a collection of canvasses of the 19th-century artists) in July-August 1995 was the first of the future exhibits of other artists and the beginning of the collaboration between the bank and the Art Museum of Karelia. The exhibit was attended by the directors of the bank from Moscow. It was opened by the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Karelia, T. Kalashnik. Among the journalists at the press conference, I noticed the head editor of the regional newspaper Karelia, where I worked for a year as an editor. I remembered how one day in 1993 I brought him materials about Volodia’s works and he asked with a sneer: Do you think your husband is a genius? I answered: You are a smart person and know from the Bible that many are called but a few chosen. Why are you surprised? Of course, the materials were never printed. And in 1995 he himself had to write about my husband.
We waited in vain for the showing of the Karelian TV film about the bank exhibit, even though by that time Vladimir’s paintings had been filmed by Moscow and St. Petersburg TV, as well as by foreign filmmakers. Karelian TV hoped that the bank, as a sponsor of the exhibit, would cover the costs of the program. However, apparently, the bank decided to save money. The exhibits of the artists showing their works in the bank after Fomin were filmed for free. When an acquaintance called us and told us that she saw on Finnish TV a video about my husband’s art, Fomin could not stop himself from comparing the Finnish journalists with their Karelian colleagues. The Finns made the film only because they liked the paintings. Our television did not want to show the film made during the exhibition at the bank to the Karelians, who, anyway, have no opportunity to see anything. After all, nobody knows when a spark will ignite someone’s soul. Some child in Petrozavodsk was denied a chance to see my pictures.
The local authorities did not lift a finger to advertise the series Fomin painted about the Russian North and Karelia. No postcard was printed, no line was written. Like grass through asphalt private initiatives broke through, going against the established attitude toward Volodia. The head of the Karelian government during a meeting with the artist admitted: What can I do for you if you are already so well known? When the head of the Republic considered buying Fomin’s paintings for himself or for the museum, people working for him advised not to be seriously interested in “avant-garde lubok.” What kept us calm was the saying that a prophet is never recognized in his own town.
In Finland, Fomin’s Vepsa series became famous after an exhibit in October and November of 1995 at the National Finnish Museum of Hunting and Fishing in Riihimaki. L. Hiltula, the director of this well-endowed museum which operates on donations of hunters and fishermen from all over the country, warned us immediately that the speeches at the opening of the show by the Director of the Society or the Advisor to the Consul of the Russian Federation in Helsinki, the director of the Russian Centre of Science and Culture, S. Otreshko, meant very little in comparison with the opinions of professional critics. The museum had no control whether the representatives of the press come to the opening and to the press conference and whether they write anything or not. And yet, there was not even one serious publication, starting from the most important, the Helsinki Sanomat, that wouldn’t include publications of art historians and journalists about the unique talent from Russia. So much information was published in papers and journals, shown on TV and discussed on the radio that Fomin and I were asked to go on an official trip to Helsinki. We visited the summer house of the President, whose parents attended the exhibit, and we were invited by directors of many museums. One of them joked that we came from the “pig” exhibit to the “horse” one. A symbol of the exhibit in Riihimaki, adorning the brochure, was Deer. But the press, as if in agreement, made Boar the symbol of the Vepsa series, even though in the museum at that time one could see everything related to horses.
At the Atheneum, the main museum of Finland, we saw the epic canvasses based on the Kalevala by the classical painter A. Gallen-Kallela, after which Fomin felt the need to paint the epic in his own style. In the house-museum of Gallen-Kallela not far from Helsinki, my husband photographed the toilet, where, according to him, the auras of E. Munch and A. Strindberg, earlier guests of Kallela, remained. He signed the book of visitors under some famous name which we soon forgot.
In January 1996, the Consulate of Russia in Finland asked the National Museum of Hunting to lend several paintings from the Vepsa series from its collection for an exhibit in the Russian Center of Science and Culture in Helsinki. And this turned out to be a show where the Vepsa series played its swan song – all the paintings were bought by the French, American, German, and Finnish collectors.
I dealt with pagan holy objects, said Fomin, parting with the Vepsa paintings, proofs that society did not change a bit. People are worshipping television sets, tape recorders, money, various beautiful objects – whatever, just not the soul and God! Beautiful cars, beautiful food… All of us are really pagans. Beautiful pictures are also paganism.
LIFE ON KIZHI
When in the summer of 1994 on the island of Kizhi, Fomin simultaneously worked on two series – Lubok and Vepsa and made sketches for the third – Kizhi, I asked him whether he would want to combine the Vepsa and the Kizhi themes into one series called Pagan. All the monuments on the island were created in the Christian period, but in each of them are also many traces of paganism. In a chapel at the end of the island one can see Christ on the cross and next to him - on the right – the Sun (the pagan god Iarilo), and on the left – the Moon. Pagan signs are everywhere – on the window frames of the huts, embroidered towels, and even on a cup shaped like a duck.
No, he answered. Everything that is connected with the natural phenomena – with the forest, sky, and water – is related to paganism. Christianity is a different stage of development and relates to God. The ‘Vepsa’ and the ‘Kizhi’ series are two different worlds.
The melody of Kizhi, its universal chords, had resounded in the artist’s soul from his youth. We both came to the island for the first time in 1992. We arrived at six in the morning on the first “rocket” ship deployed on the lake. Lying on the wet grass next to the Archangel Michael’s chapel, we listened with delight to a delicate ringing of the bells. The “sticks” under the cupola of the slender wooden building were talking with the wind about something sweet. Looking at the sky with floating puffy clouds shaped like sheep, foxes, and wolf cubs, Vladimir was mentally painting the picture Clouds of My Youth, which sprang to life in color in 1994.
We tried to predict what our future would be in Karelia. We could not have known that the musical sticks – “kantele” – were singing about the future series, Kalevala, and telling us that on earth there are not only many people, but also many snakes. Afterwards, standing in the grass up to my waist next to the twenty-two-cupola Transfiguration Church, I prayed. More adamantly than ever before, I asked God to bring Volodia the recognition he deserved.
In 1994, I was invited to work for the State Open-Air Museum Kizhi. In the spring I was in Petrozavodsk, in the summer on the island. Among my duties was the general leadership of the museum collective, welcoming of the official delegations, and general operations. The guards on the island got used to me being their boss so fast that once they detained the museum’s director without a permit, when he appeared on the day of the visit of the President of Russia. At first, I was skeptical about the words of a certain woman from the Hermitage (who used to come to the Kizhi for many years) that it is an island of love and here everybody goes nuts from the unusual energy of the place. But I experienced something much worse – an admirer who greeted me every day with a bouquet of wild flowers, looked at my husband’s paintings with no sign of comprehension and constantly asked What kind of jackal are you talking about all the time? when we talked about Chagall. It’s doubtful that his friendship with our family moved him to obtain any knowledge about historical personalities whose spirits guarded our little cell on Kizhi.
Only three people associated with the museum supported us, secretly, since everyone else in the museum community fanatically stirred up the flames to cook us in a pot of envy, gossip, and denunciations. On the island we found ourselves in the center of а strange spinning wheel. On one side of it were local inhabitants and the workers of the museum, who condemned Fomin’s paintings though they usually only heard about them. On the other side were long lines of foreigners, with those among them who decided to personally show their appreciation for the artist.
Feeling guilty about Volodia, who settled on the island because I asked him to, I tried to shield him from indignant remarks made behind his back by those who were disappointed that I protected him too much from their advice: You came here, so paint Kizhi like everybody else! I made Xerox copies of his graphic works, which were sold in a shed converted into an art salon and decorated all over by similar landscapes painted by the people from all over Russia who were vacationing on the island. After all, every day, three or four steamships docked at the island. The foreigners, knocking their heads on the low entrance beam to this “temple of art,” looked at “Russianness” depicted in two variants: in the foreground a bush (young birch tree or young rowanberry), in the background – a little church, or vice versa… and sometimes bought Xerox copies of Fomin’s works, which were not related to Kizhi.
The wives of Picasso, Dali, and Leger, and the friend of Matisse were admired and you are being criticized, my husband tried to calm me down. Who but my wife, who shares with me a similar intellect, will help me? Nobody. And can we blame those who grew up on the examples of imitation from children’s textbooks with pictures by Shishkin and Levitan and degraded them to the level of shed kitsch? Many unfortunate people year after year survive by painting the same things hundred times each summer. They were taught to think like mediocrities. Everything is based on money. This “art” gives satisfaction neither to the artists themselves, nor to the foreign visitors, nor to the museum. The first drink their false talent away, the second don’t lose much because they buy cheaply, and the museum directors are appeased by the presence of some culture at least.
Fomin could never understand hundreds of artists graduating every year from art schools in the country and their children, entering the same schools. He thought about them approximately in the same way as a certain theater director we knew thought about the performance of a leading actress, whom he could not “move” because she was a wife of a Minister of Culture. I did not like the spectacles with that actress, who was admired publicly for her refined nature. The director, as if he were apologizing to me (or his viewers), trustingly informed me that the thing I don’t like is called in his language “inability to come out of character.” In all the roles she played she used the same “skeletons,” the same construction of character and that kept her in the theatre. Fomin thought that it was stupid to go through a creative life blindly, without a connection with higher forces. Russian artists, he said, stand on the streets of all European countries, sell identical landscapes, and are angry that foreigners don’t understand anything. But Russia is still a country of paupers as far as intellect is concerned. In Germany, possibly, there are fewer rich people than in Russia, but the mass there is more intelligent.
With my salary of 46 rubles per month and more than modest income from the sale of the Xerox copies of Volodia’s paintings, we did not notice the horrible material paucity gripping the island, which received a supply of bread and one kind of canned meat once a week. We drank tea made with the water from the lake, ate fish, plentiful in quiet shallow spots, and pizza with sorrel, which Fomin picked every day until he stumbled upon a poisonous snake. We swam a lot because that summer the heat was almost 30 degrees Centigrade, for the first time in a hundred years. Despite this, the water in the Onega remained icy. A visiting journalist from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a professional swimmer, developed a leg cramp from the cold and I had to rescue her. The incident helped us get to know her friend Gregory Ingleright, the most highly paid among the journalists accredited in Moscow at the time, a correspondent from fashion shows of haute couture and collaborator with the American journal ART+Auction. He was not interested in the art of the contemporary Russian artists, with the exception of Z. Tsereteli, whom he did not appreciate and whom he criticized mercilessly. He published a note about my husband in ART+Auction.
Unfortunately, many publications from that period did not survive because we did not have access to the Internet or other means to obtain information disseminated in the press by Western journalists. At the time we did not consider all this important. I remember two more journalists: M. Tagawa from the newspaper Akahata, organ of the Japanese Communist party, and V. Lupan from the French Le Figaro. The first I remember because, afraid of missing his ship, he asked me to give him a running tour and energetically moved his elbows as he ran. I could hardly keep up with him on my high shouting into the strong wind all the facts he wanted to know about Fomin’s life. It would be difficult to imagine a funnier tour given to an official visitor. And V. Lupan, who spoke excellent Russian, after selecting a Xerox copy of a graphic work he liked, promised to write about its creator, when he had a show in Paris. We reminded him about his promise when in the prestigious gallery Art Present in the center of Paris in September 2008 my husband’s works were shown. By that time Lupan had become the editor-in-chief of the paper Russian Thought and a writer. He rarely leaves his home in the French mountains.
One time I met on the island an elderly French woman, who said: I saw this place and now God will take me in peace. I asked Volodia then: Why aren’t more foreigners coming to Kizhi? Because they come here once in their life, explained my husband. For them, this island will remain exactly the same as for me, when I came to Karelia for the first time. I was ready for a miracle – my soul longed for it. On this tiny piece of land, foreigners experience the atmosphere of joy and satisfaction which they bring here and take away from here. They are like a mother who loves the baby she carries long before it enters this world.
He was also able to easily explain the phenomenon that foreigners were buying the Xerox copies of his lubok instead of the pictures with views of Kizhi. Without realizing it, he maintained, they feel the need to unexpectedly combine the unique image of Kizhi with my unusual lubok. When foreigners pay for a picture, they know that it is worth the money they paid. In contrast, Russians know that sausages, clothes, cars, or rugs have a price; pictures aren’t worth anything. Our Croesuses, who after perestroika made a lot of money, are turning their money into nothing. In Germany, a painting costs more than a rug. As prices paid for art go up, prices for everything else should be falling proportionally.
Volodia predicted word for word the interview which we saw on TV when we came for a weekend to our Petrozavodsk apartment. The Man of the Year (a title given every year by the government of Karelia) was boasting: I am investing in property and real estate: cars, garages, and cottages. I cannot invest in paintings. I don’t understand what they are.
Now you see, my husband complained. The Man of the Year can live without beauty. This is a lack of respect for your own people – let the foreigners feed me. In the West everything is subordinated to beauty. Beginning with the forms of the houses, furniture, and tape recorders and ending with the forms of cookies. Lack of respect for your own people begins when a person does not need beauty. And if beauty is not needed, then why should one make beautiful things and create a beautiful life? God dwells in beauty, harmony, and light. They are the image of God.
One of the scholarly types from the museum dropped in one day and, after looking at the walls of our dwelling, indignantly growled: Yes, the worse the living conditions, the brighter the paintings. And foreigners, meeting my husband, the artist, always wanted to know why he didn’t paint Kizhi as brightly, beautifully, and originally as the animals from the Vepsa series. These meetings were inspirational. Fomin was realizing his prophetic vision from Tomsk, in which he saw himself at a wondrous island painting a church. The church was shining with colors that simply didn’t exist in nature. Now he wanted his fantasies to turn into reality as soon as possible. His sketches for the Kizhi series were taken only from nature, not done in an artificial studio setting. While working on other series, getting ready for exhibits in the American Consulate in Moscow, a gallery in Germany, and a museum in Finland, he started Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus several times. But the canvas seemed to be untouchable. Time and time again he would put the brush aside and return to his passion for painting the steamboats which became forerunners of the Kizhi series. This island needs me and my lubok as much as the pagans needed Lazarus and his Christian church, Volodia said on the last day of our three-month-long stay on Kizhi.
I typed my dismissal notice and told Volodia that we were leaving the island at once. The immediate reason was my quarrel with the museum’s secretary, whose attacks of white fever did not stop her from becoming the director two years later. As a former party organizer in a factory, she knew how to organize banquets for the comrades from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation – free vodka, fishing trips, steam baths, girls… The noisy parties in her house, which stood across from ours, usually ended with her knocking on our door before dawn and asking us to save her from vipers squeezing her throat. But I only paid attention to real snakes. I often cried, feeling helpless because I was not allowed to put on the island little signs with a warning “Caution! Snakes!” I often witnessed mothers running in panic holding small children, whose hands or legs had turned purple from a snake bite for which they could find no serum anywhere. Someone at the top did not want to frighten the tourists and stop them from visiting the architectural monument listed by UNESCO next to the Moscow Kremlin.
We were leaving to nowhere on the last “rocket” ship, carrying the unfinished Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus. We were followed by a sobbing homeless man, who used to bake bread on the island. After several jail terms, he assured us that he knew what to make out of people and that Fomin was lucky to have such a “broad” as myself. This doubtful complement from the Kizhi native, who gave us his “blessing,” made me smile, when, already standing on the deck, I was looking at the church cupolas slowly floating away.
The island had divided my conscience. On the one hand I was followed by everything bad that I experienced there. Not by chance, when I was saying goodbye to Kizhi, a guard gave me a snake he caught. I wanted to put it in alcohol and preserve it for memory about the evil so often witnessed in people. On the other hand, our life on Kizhi had spiritual meaning. Vladimir saw sense in the fact that, working on the island, he was reaching the highest levels of art. And this justified everything.
I admire Fomin, who in the summer of 1994 developed and forever kept an intense feeling of freedom – flight over himself, people, and the world. The Kizhi period became a “star hour” of his life.
THE MAGICIAN
The only self-portrait by Fomin, entitled The Magician, was painted in 1994 and became a symbol of his further work. In the picture one can see a funny “motley” little man with asymmetrically placed eyes. His inner world is rendered by a colorful symbolic ornament under the folds of his frock coat. The tiny magician with a miniature top hat on his round head, with a huge butterfly on his neck, with a little brush in his hand, brave and trustful, enters the cruel and sinister world riding a tiny bicycle. Above him float the clouds from his childhood. On the right and the left sides simultaneously shine both the Sun and the Moon.
Thanks to a happy coincidence, after I said goodbye to my administrative work on Kizhi, I worked for four months as an assistant to the head editor of the first commercial advertising publication in Petrozavodsk, with the same title -- Magician. There I met a Ukrainian computer designer, A. Kozhushner. After seeing Fomin’s self-portrait, he came up with the insane idea to submit it in a computerized variant to the most prestigious international contest of computer graphics Corel World Design Contest, taking place at the National Center of the Arts in Ottawa in 1995. Among the sponsors of the contest were Hewlett Packard, Xerox, Canon, Viacom, Pixar, Polaroid, and many other leading world firms. The chances of winning were one to more than seven thousand – the number of submissions from various countries accepted by the jury to participate in the contest. According to the rules, only the works simultaneously conceived and rendered with computer graphic programs were to be judged. Copying of paintings or graphic works of other authors was not allowed. The blatant imitation (borrowing) did not upset the jury, even though Kozhushner sent to Corel the computer version of the Magician, an image of the original, and a packet with Xerox copies of Fomin’s graphic works. Ultimately, the jury made an unprecedented decision to change the rules for the first time in the history of the contest. In the Ottawa Center of Arts the Xerox copies of the “avant-garde lubok” were exhibited and the work, translated into the language of the computer graphics and renamed The Artist to honor the painter, won the Grand Prize. The jury decided that the painting of the Russian artist Fomin converted into computer version by the Ukrainian designer Kozhushner won in two categories, The Best in America and The Best in Europe. Fomin’s The Artist became the only entry given a special prize, The Best of Europe and the Rest of the World. He could not personally participate in the award ceremony because we simply could not come up with money, tickets or even the clothing necessary for the ceremony, so we waited for the prize to be delivered to us. First, Vladimir received from Canada a medal, a diploma, and a CD with the works of the contest participants. Soon after came the album-catalogue. In the catalogue, next to the reproduction of The Artist, was the Black Square of Malevich. At the bottom of the black page was an inscription: Artist V. Fomin.
This story is an example that success and material well-being don’t always go together. Creative individuals, whose companions, legends and myths, accompany them while they are alive and after their deaths, almost never find fame and wealth during their lives. We consoled ourselves with thoughts that other artists, like Franz Schubert, who did not even live to 32 and whose total savings were 10 florins, hid in the theatre gallery in a worn-out frock-coat, unable to appear before his audience when they wanted to recognize and applaud him for his great work, Ave Maria. He also could not afford formal wear!
The inner world of a man cannot be glimpsed from what he looks like on the outside. The inner world of the Magician, who entered the wide world of art through the capital of Canada, continued to grow rapidly, turning into detailed, brightly-colored pictures with new themes, plots, and imagery.
MULTICOLORED KIZHI
It took more than one year for the pencil sketches of the Kizhi architecture to turn into the music of colors, into a symphony of unique image of multicolored Kizhi. In 1995 the Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus was finished and bought by the German collector V. Goetz from Bremen. This man played in our life the role of God’s messenger. After he saw the Xerox copies of Volodia’s works in the island’s shed-store, he insisted on being introduced to the artist. He was brought to see me and I took him to our little house on the island. Afterwards, he would appear in Petrozavodsk several years in a row and would buy paintings. The other admirer of Fomin’s talent was the Moscow businessman Iurii Elashkin, who at first collected St. Petersburg artists from the peak period of the Soviet underground and then became interested in the “avant-garde lubok master,” whom, like Goetz, he discovered on Kizhi. His satellite-producing firm occupied the entire twenty-eighth floor of the old Moscow City Hall, where he wanted to organize an exhibit solely for Fomin. But the exhibit never materialized because the paintings could not be hanged above the twenty-eighth floor. However, when Moscow celebrated lavishly its 850th anniversary in 1997, Elashkin presented the mayor of the city, Yurii Luzhkov, a painting by the avant-garde lubok master Fomin. The mayor, with his characteristic simplicity and decisiveness, publically announced that the painting would be the seedling of the painting collection of the Moscow City Hall.
Elashkin could afford many things. For instance, to erect a building for his firm, Business-Connection in the center of Moscow, across from the Moscow Zoo, or to present to people who “had everything” a delightful gift like Fomin’s painting. As most post-Soviet aristocrats, he was not free of superstitions. Once, after he discovered the listening “bugs” in the walls of his office behind Vladimir’s paintings, whether in jest or seriously, he said he does not trust his art. And when he learned about the outcome of an accident in which the painting Flower from the Kizhi series was destroyed, he started believing in mysterious powers of art. That evening, after work, he was supposed to drive with his wife and a friend from Moscow to the dacha of a female acquaintance on the day of her birthday, but his business delayed him. The car, with his wife sitting in the back seat and holding in her hands, like an icon, the painting designated for the birthday celebrant, rolled over several times on high speed. Neither the wife and her friend, nor the driver received the slightest scratches, while the painting, together with its frame, turned literally into dust. A famous astrologer, T. Globa, assured the Elashkin family that the painting took on itself the knock of fate and its energy prevented the tragedy, diverted the misfortune from the people.
In 2006 Elashkin did the artist a favor by introducing him to a gallery owner from the famous Rublevka district – the concentration of all the rich people of Russia. It would be sufficient for Vladimir to supply three works a year to the gallery owner to live comfortably. But Volodia refused, despite my insistence. When we were alone, having in mind the tastes of the “new Russians,” my husband put an end to our quarrel: Though there are people who lower themselves to the level of the “herd” in art, it doesn’t mean that I also should lower myself to this level.
Walking for a short period through our life, Goetz and Elashkin left behind a trace covered in the artist’s soul with roses almost without thorns. Thanks to these two men, Vladimir was able to create even at the time when we experienced an acute need for money. They supported him at the most difficult time, when he was just mounting the wave of recognition.
The work on the Kizhi series, which appeared like a flash from the past, made Fomin so involved that, having started to paint in 1995, he kept returning to it up until 2010. The second Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus was bought by an admirer from Helsinki during the exhibition in the Café of Pani Amanda in Riihimaki, where in the summer of 1996, Vladimir and I, accompanied by my daughter Alexandra, were on vacation. We often dropped in to the Museum of Hunting to admire the Vepsa paintings bought by the museum in 1995-6 and to the Museum of Fine Arts, where in the permanent collection, together with the paintings by Picasso, Dali, Miro, and Monet, from February 1996, hung the Steamship by Fomin. Even there Vladimir made sketches for the future works. In the Café of Pani Amanda, Volodia had a significant conversation with the director of the art museum in the city, T. Simonainen, who suggested that the artist illustrate the Finno-Ugric epic, Kalevala, in his unique style.
Fantasies devoted to the Resurrection of Lazarus were mysteriously reflected in two more compositionally complex works, Dialectics of the Russian North 1 and Dialectics of the Russian North 2, exhibited at the Albin Polasek Museum in Winter Park, Florida, in 2006. The second work, in which Lazarus from Byzantium pulls up the hill the Kizhi churches, is based on the artist’s idea that every individual is God’s agent on earth оn а lonely mission to change the world. In this image Fomin depicts himself as well because his goal is not only to simply paint pictures but also to study art. He strove, by transforming various “isms” (primitivism, surrealism, abstractionism, expressionism, and suprematism) and using as a base the achievements of decorative and applied arts, to create his own style of art – “Fomin’s modern” or “avant-garde lubok.”
The painting Under a Pine Tree from the Kizhi series was bought in 1996 by the clergyman N. Ozolin, the director of the annex of the Patriarchate of Moscow and All the Russia in Petrozavodsk and the head priest of the Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior on the island of Kizhi. We had met him before he became a priest, which, apparently he felt obligated to do because of his background as a third generation émigré and his birth in the family of a priest in Paris. Long before he was ordained, he bought and sent to Russia Fomin’s graphic work Eiffel Tower. At that time, not yet “Father Nikolai,” he came to Kizhi with his future wife. I helped them settle in an old house with a stove, where the loving couple lived for several days. In the evenings they sat on the dock and watched the sunset on the lake. They seemed to embrace the entire island. Something common was between this couple and the painting which appeared a year later, like their beloved daughter. By the artist’s will, the tree turned into a symbol. The pine’s branches, like two gentle hands, kept warming Kizhi up.
A mysterious fate befell the painting Chapel of Archangel Michael, which in August 1996 found itself in the Art Museum of Karelia. In 2005, the bank “Vozrozhdenie,” to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of art exhibitions in its walls started by Fomin’s exhibit in 1995, tried to obtain from the museum collection the Chapel of Archangel Michael. The new director of the museum, apparently because of a conflict between her and the artist during his exhibit in 1999 in the Museum of Art in Riihimaki, swore that the museum did not have the painting. But thanks to the efforts of the bank’s director, the main sponsor of the new show, Archangel Michael was miraculously returned. The incident made such an unpleasant impression on Fomin that even if the local museum asked him some day to leave his paintings to them, he would not be happy.
With the exception of the Archangel Michael, all the Kizhi works stayed abroad after the exhibitions in the Finnish gallery Villa Nurminata in 1998 (The Candle, The Window to the Russian North), the Norwegian gallery Nord-Norge in 2002 (Flower, Windmill of Joy, Russian Symmetry), in Finnish-Norwegian Institute of Culture in Oslo in 2002 (Eyes), and the Russian Center at the Russian Federation’s Consulate in Helsinki in 2007 (Tree of Life).
In 2011 Fomin finished the work on the Kizhi series, having created the largest, seventeenth picture with the same name. Symbolically, the first painting in the series was the Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus, the oldest preserved Russian wooden church, and the central place in the last was rightfully occupied by the Church of Transfiguration – the highest point in the development of Russian folk architecture. The closeness of the Church of Lazarus and the Church of Transfiguration in space and time (like in the painting Dialectics of the Russian North 2) represents two epochs -- the starting point and the highest achievement of Russian wooden architecture. Fixed on the canvasses of the artist, the churches speak to their heirs in Pushkin’s words: Respect for the past distinguishes an educated man from a savage.
