rus   fin   eng   
  Biography     The book about the artist     Paintings     Drawings     The Press     Monograph     Exhibitions     Certificates    Sale    Photos    Back Home Next E-mail
    Biography
In the ratings of the International Data Bank of Modern Art, Vladimir Fomin is listed among the ten top artists of Russia. Television documentaries about Fomin have been produced in the USA, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Russia. His works adorn the pages of hundreds of publications totaling more than million copies, are displayed on the Internet on more than 50 web sites, and are included in dozens of art CDs. More than 700 of his works are in the permanent collections of museums in Russia, Finland, and Norway, and in private collections, art galleries, and cultural centers around the world, including the Russian Museum, Art Museum of the Republic of Karelia, Tomsk Regional Museum, Museum of the Khanty-Mansiisk Region, art museums in Riihimaki, Ioensuu, and Mikkeli; The Finnish National Hunting Museum, the Henrik Ibsen Museum (National Museum of Norway), as well as in the collections of the Government of the City of Moscow and the diplomatic missions of Russia, the United States, and Finland. Fomins art is studied in colleges and universities in the United States, Hungary (from 1999), Finland, Russia (from 2000), and Norway (from 2002).

Vladimir Nikolaevich Fomin was born in Tomsk, Siberia, on January 14, 1963. In 1989, he graduated from the Krasnoselsky Jewelry Institute. From 1984 to 1992, he honed his skills, learning from the native artists of Central Russia and studying applied arts of the Finno-Ugric peoples of Siberia and Northern Russia. Early in his career, he exhibited his works on large cruise ships of many countries. Since 1992, he has lived and worked in Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia. In the past twenty years, Fomin has created more than 15 series of paintings and drawings and exhibited them in more than 30 one-man shows in museums and galleries of various countries, including twelve in Finland, three in Sweden, three in Norway, four in Germany, and five in the United States. The artists paintings illustrate the encyclopedia World Mythology published in London in 2004 and 2005, and in other books printed between 2006 and 2008 by the American, Finnish, and Russian presses.

In 1995, Fomin participated in the prestigious Corel World Design Contest of computer-generated graphic art held at the National Center of the Arts in Ottawa, Canada. Out of 7500 participants, Fomin was awarded a special prize, Best of Europe and the Rest of the World, for his painting entitled The Artist. In 2001, he received a special grant from the Council of Ministers of Scandinavian countries. He collaborated with well-known Norwegian, Finnish, English, and Russian galleries, including the Internet-based galleries Art-Info, World Art Network, Art Salon, Art Russia, Saatchi Gallery, and other virtual galleries. In 2002, the artist became the first Russian painter to publish a multimedia CD about his art in English, Russian, and Finnish, with an original musical sound track and 300 color reproductions.

Finland, a country in which a book Kalevala symbolizes national and cultural revival, not only declared Vladimr Fomins series of paintings devoted to the epic as unique, but marked the 150th anniversary of the epics publication by organizing exhibitions of Fomins Kalevala series in Scandinavian museums. During the unprecedented exhibition tour of museums in Finland, Sweden, and Norway in 1999-2008, Fomins Kalevala series was seen by more than fifty-five thousand visitors. After the exhibit in Norwegian galleries in Oslo and Harstad, the series Peer Gynt: Henrik Ibsen was declared a national treasure of the Norwegian people. In 2005, during the exhibit at the National Museum of Norway dedicated to the 100 anniversary of Norwegian and Russian diplomatic relations and opened by the king of Norway, the artist showed a painting which became a part of permanent exposition in Henrik Ibsens museum.

Vladimir Fomin has also dedicated many of his works to the Russian North, being the first among Russian artists to create several painterly series Mandalas, Vepsa, Kizhi, Kalevala, Spiritual, and The Tales of the North in which the visual language renders the basic cultural and historical values of the region.


Vladimir Fomins Art

The artists works belong, generally, to neoprimitivism, but also incorporate elements of abstraction and surrealism. The early works can be called an avant-garde lubok. They are marked by bright colors and simple imagery common to hand-colored folk prints; however, they are combined with the stylistic innovations of the Russian avant-garde of the 1900s, elements of neoprimitivist and surrealist styles, Finno-Ugric ornament, and with decorative patterning and finesse of execution. These works are best represented in the Political series (related to philosophical and political subjects) and the Lubok series (based on recollections from childhood and various street festivities). The early works are deeply optimistic and show a good-natured, ironic understanding of the world and the mans place in it.

The later works are characterized by extreme saturation of space, better defined forms, and harmonious colors. These elements can be seen in the Gifts series (a tribute to the great masters and their masterpieces Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Eduard Munch, Nikolai Gumilev, Ian Sibellius, and others), the Vepsa series (dedicated to the ancient cults of the Vepsa and Karela people), the Kizhi series (based on the architectural monuments on the island of Kizhi), the Kalevala series (inspired by the Karelian and Finnish epic Kalevala), the Peer Gynt: Henrik Ibsen series (illustrating the famous drama by Ibsen), the Mandalas, Spiritual, and Pagan series (devoted to religious and philosophical subjects), the Maidens, Ladies, and Madonnas series (womans image in art), The Tales of the North series (a celebration of the Scandinavian folk tales), the Friedrich Nietzsche series (exploring Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra), and the Musical series (related to the associations between art and music).

Welcoming the artists exhibitions at the Albin Polasek Museum in Winter Park, Florida, in 2006 and 2008, American art commentators and the press said: In his entire creative oeuvre Vladimir Fomin affirms his right to intellectual and spiritual artistic search. The specialists claim that Fomins canvasses hypnotize the viewers, astonish them with their fine, mosaic-like technique, harmonious color combinations, exciting forms, astonishingly complex compositions, and refinement of design, characterizing the artists unique style that synthesizes the traditional, popular, and experimental in world art. His painting style is a combination of several elements: Russian popular print (lubok), featuring a vivid and fine outline filled with color by hand; Russian avant-garde experiments, and Northern ornament. Fomin also borrowed colors and stylistic peculiarities of famous artists, such as Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov, Martiryos Saryan, Leo Swemp, Salvador Dali, and many others. This conscious combining, reworking, and organizing of all the elements forms the unique, but completely logical, personal style of Vladimir Fomin.


Vladimir Fomin About His Art

About the Vepsa series:

Creating this series, I tried, as far as it was possible, to retrace the journey of previous generations from generalizations, from the idea that form is a sign, from the hieroglyphics, symbols, allegories, and metaphors to the intellectual discoveries of modern art. And I still don't know where this journey begins and where it ends."

I am drawn to painting animals. On the picture, an animal appears as a bright spot and grabs the attention of the viewer. I combined an X-ray style with a skeleton style by interpreting them and merging them into one modern style, by adding color (paint) to metal (ancient Vepsa jewelry). Using traditions (ornamentation and two autonomous styles), I arrived at a new lubok form and created a mutated art. This art has the ornamental quality of toys from Kostroma, Novgorod, Vologda, and Yaroslavl.

As an artist, I constantly search for nave forms in art. I am trying to find characteristic features common to creative life of particular nation or nations. For an artist it is a discovery, when some nation possesses vivid characteristic features of art, like the Vepsa people do. Perhaps I was successful synthesizing these two styles because by profession I am a jeweler and my specialty was artistic work with metal. In addition, I used the lubok forms, which I worked out during my artistic development.

About the Kizhi series:

I saw with my own eyes what I saw in my dream

For me, this island will remain exactly the same as at that time, when I traveled to Karelia for the first time. I was ready for miracles. In my soul was this expectation of a miracle. I felt beforehand the atmosphere of joy, satisfaction. Working on the sketches for the series, I read, as if it were a book, the secrets of the Kizhi architectural ensemble which survived only thanks to a happy turn of circumstances. Theres no time or reason to prove to anyone my right to personal visions.

Art is born the same way as the Church of the Transfiguration appeared. Someone on the island went mad and decided to create beauty. He built a church with twenty two cupolas. Art is born, when something new, astonishing, divinely inspired happens. Kizhi is absolutely inimitable and for that reason always new. Dont believe those who say that a church should be brown, stones grey, and a painting realistic

About the Kalevala series:

I see Kalevala as an open palm of the One who showed me the lines of life on earth. My mission is to tell about those lines using the artistic language of the 21st century. The runes appear to me as a ball of associations which can be unraveled in color, in mental and visual images, and all threads of which emerge from my genetic memory. Kalevala is a true fairy tale of the earth, but it has its origins in human inner core, in generational intuition. Themes of birth and death, life-long struggle for survival and the interconnection of everything on earth with the cosmos those are the things, which, like in a mirror, got reflected in my soul.

About the Peer Gynt: Henrik Ibsen series:

Just imagine: after my series Ibsen wins the Nobel Prize Everything can happen We come to this world to lead a dialogue with eternity. This is the main thing that did not occur in the life of Peer Gynt. For an artist, his works are such a dialogue.

About the Gifts series:

If life is the most precious gift, there is nothing more precious than communication with others. Only by giving gifts to great people I understand life.

About the Maidens, Ladies, and Madonnas series:

If you are born an artist, you are born and you die with your own Mona Lisa in your soul.

About the Mandalas series:

Geniuses are the fingers of God with which He fashions the One Thing. Life is a mandala that incorporates everything that man does.

About the Tales of the North series:

I agree with Albert Einstein who said that imagination is more important than knowledge.

About the Musical series:

For one who serves the muses, everything has been said in the Old Testament: You shall not have other gods before you (Exodus 20:3). The sounds of my soul pierce the canvas the same way as the star dust dissolves in the Universe and leaves tracks for Eternity.


Vladimir Fomin

Up   |   Back   |   Home
 
     Matti Vehvilainen
Besucherzahler russian wives
счетчик посещений
 
Vladimir Fomin: fomin@onego.ru

www.rollins.edu
Vottovaara
www.pegrema.narod.ru
artru.info
fomin-art.narod.ru
Сайт Финноугория
vkontakte.ru
facebook.com