Backwoods

AA Rylov entered the history of Russian painting primarily as the author of two famous landscapes - "Green Noise" and "In the Blue Space", although he left a legacy of a large and very high artistic level.

Rylov was born on the way, when his parents were traveling to Vyatka. Rylov dedicated wonderful pages of memoirs to this city, where the future artist grew up, to the surrounding nature, to his childhood.

In 1893 Rylov entered the Academy of Arts, and a year later he was invited to his studio by A.I. Kuindzhi, who had long been a cherished dream of the young artist. Rylov in the full sense of the word can be considered a student and follower of Kuindzhi. They are surprisingly close in terms of their artistic talent. Rylov forever retained his attachment to romantically elevated and generalizing, holistic images, lighting effects, decorative understanding of color, but at the same time he precisely followed the teacher's behest to work as much as possible on nature. "Kuindzhievskaya" - romantic, dynamic, with a blazing night fire - was Rylov's diploma painting "The evil of the Tatars" (1897). The artist himself was annoyed later: why did he turn to such a "crackling" subject and not take "a modest Russian landscape, familiar nature"?

By the early 1900s. Rylov's skill has matured. In 1904, Green Noise appeared. The artist worked on the picture for two years, wrote it in the studio, using the experience of observing nature and a lot of sketches made in the vicinity of Vyatka and St. Petersburg. Contemporaries were struck by the young, joyful feeling that pervades the landscape. This is an image of an eternally triumphant, eternally changing life, when one moment quickly replaces another and they are all equally beautiful. Coloring is based on a combination of rich color relationships. A dynamically spatial solution is the opposition of a very close foreground and the immense distance that opens behind it.

The same joyful feeling and a similar spatial construction - in the painting "In the blue expanse" (1918). It depicts a windy spring morning over the roaring sea, streams of golden rays of the rising sun, white swans flying home, the land with the remnants of falling snow and a light sailing ship, directed towards the sun's rays. This image full of faith in vitality was later used for ideological purposes.

The picture was declared the first Soviet landscape, and Rylov was declared the founder of Soviet landscape painting. But he also had landscapes with a different mood - for example, "Wilderness" (1920). A swamp with black water fills the entire foreground, and beyond it - a gloomy, disturbing forest. True, the artist has much more life-affirming works: "Hot Day", "Field Rowan", "Island" (all 1922), "Birch Grove" (1923), "Old Fir Trees by the River" (1925), "Forest River" ( 1928), "Little House with a Red Roof" (1933), "On the Green Shores" (1938), etc.

Rylov possessed another rare gift — teaching. Before the revolution, he taught a "drawing class for animals" at the Drawing School at the Artists' Society, and after 1917 he taught at the Academy of Arts. His advice and instructions were appreciated not only by students, but also by venerable artists. They also appreciated his rare spiritual purity and love for people. In general, he loved the whole living world, and this world paid him the same. Birds and animals loved him, and the displays of such love and trust amazed those around him. In his workshop, he arranged a corner of the forest. Birds lived here without a cage - robins, wrens, bloodworms, nuthatches, gulls, snipe sandpipers ... He bought them at the market or picked them up somewhere, nursed them sick and weak, nursed them, fed them, and in the spring they released them. There were also two anthills. At Rylov's home were hares, squirrels, Manka the monkey and other animals. Many fearful animals and birds were not afraid of him either, without fear, came and flew to his summer forest workshop. "Nature is released for the Rylovs very, very sparingly," wrote a friend of the artist MV Nesterov after the sad news of his death.