July 16, 2014 the Russian world suffered an irreplaceable loss - in the forty-fourth year of life, one of the greatest creators of the 20th century - artist Pavel Ryzhenko, whose cause of death - stroke - in the twentieth century, was predominant among young talented people.
Pavel Ryzhenko - a brilliant creator of historical composition
In the vastness of Europe in the modern world it is very difficult to find a talented artist working in the style of classical realism. The nature of such a creator should be revealed to become an era - contradictory in its revolutionary desire for development and simultaneous passive inaction. It is precisely because of this sinful omission that carries contented discouragement that the genius of Russian realism, Pavel Ryzhenko, grew up, whose paintings were painted exclusively in this classic style.
The artist lived a short but extremely fruitful life, being an icon of the God-chosen creator and a role model for artists of realistic traditions. The death of Pavel Ryzhenko marked the final transition of contemporary art from the channel of realism to the framework of avant-garde, the departure of the classical canons of building and colorizing the composition from the field of fine art to expressive swimming of the futuristic brevity of the idea and the straightforwardness of the composite image.
Biographical note
Pavel Ryzhenko, whose biography does not differ from several hundreds of similar biographies of artists, anticipating the interest of fans in this topic, left several notes about his past.
The future artist was born in 1970, in the city of Kaluga. In his autobiographical texts, Pavel Ryzhenko, foreseeing how much his fans would be interested in his biography, recalled that his childhood was completely and completely filled with the joy of communicating with his grandmother and mother. It was no coincidence that Pavel Viktorovich started his career: from his earliest years he was characterized by liveliness of mind and an excellent memory: “This is my homeland, bright, quiet, full of love, which many have forgotten, but many have not.”
Since 1988, Pavel is a graduate of the Moscow secondary art school at the Surikov Institute. He joined the army, where, according to him, he clearly realized his calling in painting. After her, from 1990, he studied at the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where his teacher was Professor, People's Artist of Russia I. S. Glazunov.
Pedagogical activity of Pavel Ryzhenko
Since 1997, after defending his thesis in 1996, Pavel Ryzhenko begins an active pedagogical activity at the Department of Architecture, and then restoration, and even later - the composition of his native academy. There he taught until his death. Pavel Ryzhenko is an artist whose cause of death was the result of fruitful creative activity.
Features of the spiritual filling of the composition
Pavel Viktorovich Ryzhenko was instantly glorified as a genius of the all-Russian scale after defending his thesis - the canvas “Kalka”, where the semantic center of the composition is the figure of Prince Mstislav the Old, proudly standing opposite the resting after the battle Mongolian governor. Pavel Ryzhenko, whose paintings are filled with this unbending, honest, but simple and humble character, perfectly showed the features of the Russian people.
Artist - Preacher of the Divine Idea
The artist always spoke very openly about his spiritual and practical searches. To embark on the thankful path of an Orthodox artist, immersing the audience with his art in the wonderful world of God-inspired land and the Russian nation as a whole, according to him, it was his training at the academy and getting to know the priests that helped him. He idolized the Orthodox national idea and unwittingly became its mouthpiece, evangelism. "Oslyabya", "Blessing of Sergius", "Victory of Relight", "Prayer of Relight" - in all these images, with their unshakable calm and prudence, the image of a holy man is invisibly present, which does not at all look like a canonical icon-painting. Paul himself explained this feature of his images by the fact that he considers classical Orthodox icon painting a monstrous hybrid of oriental and Byzantine painting, with their European standards and manner of writing, and not an original Russian cult painting.
Pavel Ryzhenko collaborated a lot with monasteries and high priests, writing religious paintings and portraits for them. His last work is the diorama Standing on the Ugra. The customer was the Kaluga Holy Tikhon Deserts. Unfortunately, Pavel Ryzhenko, an artist whose cause of death made the Russian world shudder with his suddenness, could not attend its opening.
Pavel Ryzhenko and his paintings in the historical genre of painting
Throughout his life, radiating his son’s love for his homeland with all his heart and consciousness and filling every stroke and every brushstroke on his canvases with this love, Pavel Ryzhenko completely and completely “saturated” his paintings of unprecedented strength with greatness. This was the greatness of the Russian Spirit, enclosed in the images of the hero of Peresvet, in the majestic but submissive pose of Emperor Nicholas II, the monumental tragic grandeur of the battles of the past and the sunlight of the monastery apiaries.
As a master of battle scenes, the composition and color scheme of which was saturated with the idea of the Divine Battle with Darkness, the artist took an active part in military-patriotic actions on the territory of Russia. He was included in the Studio of military artists named after M. B. Grekov as one of the leading master painters, and the first published information that Pavel Ryzhenko died, the cause of death, released a few days later, was reported to the press by the Culture Department of the Ministry of Defense .
During the political upheaval in the spring of 2014 in Ukraine, Pavel Ryzhenko repeatedly expressed his support for the nascent states of New Russia. In addition, in the process of writing his painting “Stohod”, the artist constantly consulted Igor Ivanovich Strelkov about the uniform of Russian officers and became very friendly with him, even capturing that on the canvas in the main triangle of the composition. Upon learning that Pavel Ryzhenko, whose cause of death was directly dependent on enormous mental activity, passed away, Strelkov wrote: “I grieve. There was a bright man. When he consulted, he already complained that his hands were numb. "
Folk artist
Pavel Ryzhenko sincerely believed in enlightened, morally clean and spiritually rich Russia, wholeheartedly supported the formation of New Russia and its political arrangement in line with the Russian state, while always remaining a monarchist. A huge number of his paintings, created since the beginning of the 1990s, are dedicated to the Battle of Kulikovo, the era of Nicholas II, as well as the First World War. In his workshop there were six ready-made dioramas, which were periodically put forward for exhibitions.
Parting words to descendants
When Pavel Ryzhenko died, the cause of death was not announced immediately. Only a few days later it became known that as a result of intense professional activity, he had a stroke.
The artist was buried in the Zhdamirovsky cemetery in the village of the same name near Kaluga.
In life, he was a very progressive-oriented person, an adherent of Orthodox thought as a historically changing filling of human life, the essence of which can be perfectly reflected in the principles of classical pictorial realism.