Painter Vladimir Fomin

Vladimir Fomin's Maidens, Ladies, and Madonnas

Fomin's series, Maidens, Ladies, and Madonnas, is linked to many periods in world history. In the context of the past and present images of women in world art, the series can be considered quite traditional. The artist's avant-garde lubok beauties follow the classical Venus, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, the ballerinas of Degas, Gauguin's Tahitians, and Petrov-Vodkin's Madonnas of the Revolution - all long-acknowledged artistic symbols. Each image reveals the maturity of the artist, who finds a unique way to depict Eternity, his master. A long row of artistic, literary, and musical works dedicated to Her Highness the Woman can be detected behind each work
In Fomin's creative journey, turning to images of women was a natural step towards the exalted. The artist can subscribe to the following words of the Russian 19th-century critic Vissarion Belinsky: "Woman's vocation is to stimulate in man the energy of his soul and ardor of noble passions, to support his sense of honor and his quest for the elevated and great - that is her purpose and this purpose is grand and sacred."
The artist maintains that one is born with a Mona Lisa and dies with a Mona Lisa. In comparison to life, art is supreme, and artistic geniuses impose their ideals on the world. The ideal of the earthly woman borne in the heart of man and the ideal of the Woman as seen by the Artist - are very different. The latter is not a single image eclipsing all others; it is an image in an image, perhaps a series of nested images. In the final analysis, the ideal of Mona Lisa is just a creative process, an aesthetic principle, a prophecy, without which there can be no Artist.
Before painting Maidens, Ladies, and Madonnas, Fomin created the series entitled Gifts, dedicated to his wife and to a number of famous artists. The wife's portraits, which became his "gifts" to her, in fact were Fomin's first allegorical experiments devoted to "the feminine in art."
One of such works, The Yellow Rose, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Mona Lisa. In The Yellow Rose Fomin's fantasy goes far beyond the theories of perfect proportions and verity proclaimed by the artists of the Renaissance. In this portrait, everything - from the "substitution" of images and details to the placement of objects on the canvass - is based on associations. Instead of the unforgettable smile of Gioconda (representing a universal face of a woman), a myth about her is born and a "pure" symbol of feminine qualities - tenderness, fragility, inconstancy, affection, and beauty - appears. The Yellow Rose, a portrait of the artist's wife, can be read as a synthetic ideal, a virtual world of the Woman.
Other works devoted to the artist's wife, which gave the stimulus to begin the series Maidens, Ladies, and Madonnas, should also be considered in the context of the world culture. Thus, the painting Kangaroo: The Girl's Morning was inspired by Nikolai Gumilev's poem with the same title. Your Thoughts Are Like a Blooming Flowerbed was initially conceived in a graphic variant, but later it was conceptually developed on canvass and incorporated into the series. The author based it on many sources, among them the Kama Sutra.
According to Fomin, the idea underlying Your Thoughts Are Like a Blooming Flowerbed approximates the Old Hindi maxim: "If there is no place, no occasion, and no one willing - then the woman is pure. However, even if she gets the god of love himself, she will want another man." The artist is convinced that "this is the nature of all women;. but the violation of love vows is beyond punishment. When God created a woman and gold, he made two mistakes, but they both enrich our life. Truly, what a woman wants God wants. Consider what Salvador Dali said about his wife: 'If I had not met Gala, I would have ended my life in a pigsty, in rags, devoured by lice…' This can be generally applied to woman's intuition and her innate wisdom. Therefore, it also applies to my wife, Svetlana. The feminine theme provides an extremely rich material because women have an extraordinary ability to create illusions, to be different than they really are. Nature makes women wise. In one word - woman is nature. And nature is like a magician. One needs to watch it very closely. I particularly like one aspect of Maidens, Ladies, and Madonnas. The series can be painted throughout the entire life and one can return to it at any time."
Interestingly, the series "opens" with two aesthetically different pictures, The Queen and A Portrait of a Certain Lady. The Queen is a loving image of the artist's wife with her real facial features, but, at the same time, with additional extravagant and surreal elements. It seems as if the artist was recalling from the past fantastic "apparitions" of nymphs and mermaids. On her head the queen has a crown made of a shell, a fish replaces her breast, and her heart is shaped like a fish's eye… But it is worth noting that the sea theme is inseparably linked to the queen's personality. Cosmologically, it is linked to the sign of the Pisces, and physically, to the events in her life. As far as her world outlook is concerned, the key to deciphering The Queen is the saying often associated with such people - "Fish don't build temples." The Argentinian painter Italo Grassi once presented Fomin's wife with a portrait of a woman with a "third eye." She is depicted in the same way in Fomin's portrait. "Fish's eye" symbolizes the world of intuition, the ability to see with your heart and soul. The face is made of forget-me-nots, the favorite flowers of the artist's wife. And, of course, the yellow roses (the dominant color of her character) became the natural background for all the elements included in the portrait of the queen.
The second work, A Portrait of a Certain Lady, in contrast, evokes associations with humorous depictions of women in art. It is a phantasmagoric representation of a woman with her head shaped like a tank and with a cat's tail. On the one hand, it is an original illustration of Seneca's thought that "Gold is proofed by fire, a woman by gold, and men - by a woman." It is a portrait of the one who is a tool in God's hands to test the stronger half of human race. On the other hand, it is a continuation of a satirical trail left in art by the ancient Greek and Roman satyrs and Bacchantes, by Bosch's and Breughel's monsters, and by Dali's and Picasso's women, unattractive or even ugly according to the conventional standards of female beauty. This portrait of a lady, which also implies the artist's wife (as indicated by yellow roses, fish, and other significant details in the painting) is painted completely in the style of lubok creators, whose early works are often characterized by paradox and humor. Undoubtedly, the picture also creates the effect of carnivalization, masterfully used earlier by Miro in his works populated by characters resembling the participants in buffooneries.
One can claim that the roots of Fomin's series reaches the ethnographic, pagan, and biblical themes of the artist's earlier cycles and series. Like an echo of earlier works, many beings that resemble the artist's wife - for instance witches from Peer Gynt or the primordial mother Ilmatar from Kalevala (even if she bears the features of the painter himself), flood the new series.
His works about maidens, birds, and animals show a unique transformation of the stories drawn from Kalevala about the creation of the world and the destruction of man. Interestingly, in the newest series the artist has abstracted himself from the concrete literary source, placing accents on "dialogue" between various female images, and making them multifaceted. He literally created a chain of images dealing with the theme "a woman and a bird" (the beloved topic of the great Spaniards Miro and Picasso).
A Maiden with a Duck, based on the motifs of the first rune of Kalevala, in which a duck makes its nest on the knee of the maiden Ilmatar, is closest in its meaning to its source. But in the painting, unlike in the women of the Kalevala series, the characteristics of Picasso's women are clearly distinguishable. The transformation of the maiden Ilmatar, hovering in the air, is achieved by the artist's departure from sharply chiseled forms and angular shapes, as well as by the use of flowing, rounded, and viscous forms. A visual illusion is thus created: line, detail, and color harmoniously flow into each other, as if the painter's brush was able to begin work and leave it at any point in the picture. A Maiden and a Duck, remotely reminiscent of the great Madonna with Child of Leonardo and Petrov-Vodkin is also spiral, cyclical, and elastic.
In A Maiden with a Drake, the cosmological theme of A Maiden with a Duck is transformed into another topic. The duck turns into a drake and the maiden gives herself to it. The intercourse is equivalent to the original sin. In The Maiden-Duck, at first it seems that the two characters are combined into one. But the duck with a head of a woman, resting on the waves (a Karelian mermaid) is a deceptively simple image. Consequently, it allows the viewer to make the most complex assumptions about the painting. Isn't the Woman the beginning of all beginnings, the cosmos and everything in it?
Fomin admits that while creating the series he did not set out to discover the essence of women. "It is impossible to comprehend the incomprehensible," he claims. "The artist's goal is just to show the feminine nature. And this nature is varied and boundless." The lubok master reveals this complexity in other feminine images of the series.
A Lady with a Hare I, A Lady with a Hare II, and A Lady with a Squirrel are paraphrases of "developed" feminine topics. In these paintings, from the depths of the painter's imagination, like a mirage, appeared shamanic legends of the ancient civilizations, in which the hare, as in the Kalevala (the death of Aino), was the constant attribute of the death of a close person. But in Fomin's works one can see more than the images of the mother lamenting her child. Thematically, they can easily be considered a transmutation of Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, a favorite painting of Fomin during his childhood and, perhaps, they embody in colors Alpha and Omega, a poem written by Fomin's early idol, Eduard Munch, in a psychiatric hospital in 1909. Alpha and Omega is a poetic testament of the Norwegian artist, and, according to its text, one should not trust a woman even when living with her on a deserted island. Munch claims that human kind consists of half-men and half-beasts because man always shares the woman with the moon and the sun, with flowers and animals…
As a result of tragic circumstances, the Woman appeared to Munch as a line of life, on one end of which was everything that he connected with the life and death of his mother and sister, and on the other end everything connected with his failed love affair.
There are hundreds of real stories about relationships of artists with women who gave them life and who took their life away. Basically, these stories are deeply tragic, since the creative process is destructive to the artist. It assumes the highest level of loneliness and a lack of understanding by others.
Fomin's Mother and Child (Self-Portrait with Mother) became the key picture exploring this theme. In the painting, the artist appears simultaneously as a baby, a hare, and a cat. In Aesopian language and in his lubok style, Fomin lets the viewers understand that life and art are just parallel worlds that never cross.
Self-Portrait with Mother is a mirror reflection of the artist's ideas about the Madonna image in religious and secular painting, particularly, the Madonnas elevated to the Olympus of art by the past masters. These works became for Fomin a collective image of the woman unable not to love and unable not to be loved. The Woman is Love. All sacrifices are placed on her altar. People give their souls to the icon of the Mother of God (there is no feeling more heartrending than mother's grief after losing her son and there is no belief more fanatical than religious one), and in the same way they turn to the canvasses of Renoir to explore their erotic fantasies.
A Woman on Horseback, a portrait of a northern Amazon, worshipped by the ancient Vepsa people and by the Scythians, and the Rape of the Snow-Woman are two works conceived as decorative erotic lubok. In the latter one can see the story of the Demon's Elk (brought to life in Kalevala). He captures a beautiful woman to admire her beauty. But this legend was preceded by the mythological story of the rape of Europa by Zeus, who turned himself into a bull, a story used by Titian, Claude Lorrain, Vladimir Serov, and other predecessors of Fomin.
In the paintings of this series, as in the Vepsa, Kizhi, and Kalevala series, one can sense the breathing of the north. Both versions of A Lady with a Hare and A Lady with a Squirrel, rendered in whitish and bluish tones of winter and in orange and green tones of the fall, are tributes to the colors of the North.
Finally, the triptych A Lover of Red Wine, A Lover of Vodka, and A Lover of Beer, painted in the colors of northern nature, occupies a somewhat separate position in the series. However, without the triptych, according to the artist, Fomin's Woman would have been imperfect. Moreover, Maidens, Ladies, and Madonnas are spiritually connected to the earlier, Pagan series. Not surprisingly, the artist often repeats that "women are one hundred percent paganism."

Svetlana Gromova
Translated by Alexander Boguslawski



	Vladimir Fomin: fomin@onego.ru