December 15, 2010 to January 20, 2011

Chainikov is a keeper of the traditions of the Russian realistic painting school. But it would be incorrect and unfair to reduce the whole creative activity of Chainikov to some stable conceptions and several conclusive resumes. His creative activity can be compared with a large river with its slow flow absorbing many tiny brooks and other small rivers. Flowing together with the main channel of realistic principles, they are dissolved in the general stream, enriching it. This process cannot be stopped and it is endless. It is too early to make any conclusions. Chainikov is sure to create a lot of new and interesting masterpieces worth our attention.

Chainikov is a wonderful master of the landscape art. He reveals himself as a master of individual talent with his motives and his own style of painting the nature. He likes the motifs connected with forests, he is also attracted by edges of woods, meadows, surrounded by trees, bands of paths and forest roads, leading one's gaze away inside a painting

The great Russian poet A. Block said, "I devote all my life to the Russian theme and I do it knowingly and finally. The same may be said of the great young Russian artist Grigoriy Chainikov. I am grateful to Chainikov who has kept faithful to himself, to his native land and to the art of his tradition. In a world full of the temptation of 'modern' art, he has been a 'keeper of the traditions' of the Russian realistic school of painting. He has opened to us, his Russia. This is not the Russia of the capital or of holidays, but the real one with its endless open spaces, villages and good-hearted people. Their life is not easy, they have sorrows, grief and joys, but more often than not, they have a lot of hardship and misery. Still, they are not broken and they live the Russian way, with open hearts and souls."

Grigory L. Chainikov 
Century Old Fir-Tree
 30¼" x 36¼" (77 x 92 cm)
1986, Oil on Canvas

Chainikov, Grigoriy Leontievich- (1960 – 2008)

In recent years Chainikov has emerged as Russian Realism's newest and brightest find. His recent death at the age of 47 is a great loss to Russia, and to the international art world.

Chainikov embraced Russian Realism and remained ever true to its spirit. As he explained, "My themes arise on their own, through insight and not from engaging in subtleties.." His landscapes are often filled with human forms. He painted the everyday: peasants, the field workers, the old, and the young. He painted only what matters, only what is real. In the pater years of his life, one could most often find the non-assuming Chainikov at The Academic Dacha, painting Russia's humblest fold, with the compassion and understanding of an artist who knows only how to paint the truth and the realism of life.

When contemplating the paintings created by Grigoriy Leontievich Chainikov, one is struck by the purity and simplicity of the artist's subject matter. Chainikov's work radiates kindness, sincerity and serenity. The art mirrors the painter's personality: engaging, humble and genuine. An artist's view of the world can dismiss abstract reasoning and meaningless rhetoric. Trained in the traditions of Russian Realism, Chainikov sees man and nature as the wellspring of his inspiration, as he uses intricate combinations of color and shade to frame a moment in time. For Chainikov, fantasy and abstract are tricks of the "evil one.

Chainikov's origin can be traced to Udmurtia, Russia, where his ancestors had resided for generations. The artist was born on November 28, 1960 in the remote village of Grakhovo. Chainikov, a self-taught sketcher, often spent the tedious summer hours he worked as a shepherd, drawing images of the countryside. Before long this hobby became an obsession and Chainikov entered The Department of Graphic Arts School, housed in a classical, ancient mansion. The formal majesty of artistic academia inspired Chainikov. Here Chainikov studied the plaster head of Apollo, amazed by the artist's ability to convey image in dimension. This became the defining element in Chainikov's style. His teachers soon recognized the student's extraordinary raw talent.

Chainikov was a prodigious worker.

Initially Chainikov painted only with watercolors, but he was soon referred to Moscow to study under Victor G. Tsyplakov, the renowned "people's artist of the USSR", where he quickly turned his skills to painting strictly with oils. Chainikov was ultimately admitted to the Surikov Institute of Arts, the most prestigious art institute of Russia. Much of Chainikov's development came under the watchful eye of Tsyplakov who taught his student to paint directly on the canvas, without sketches. For instance, the teacher had his student begin a portrait by painting only the eyes, then developing the painting around the origin. Tsyplakov and Chainikov became fast friends, as well as teacher/student.

Upon completing his training at The Instutitue, Chainikov went to the Russian Academy of Arts, painting alongside two of Russia's most honored artists, brothers, Alexi and Sergei Tkachev. Gaining admission to the Artist's "Akademicheskaya Dacha" enabled Tkachevs the opportunity to study the younger Chainikov's works. The brothers were teachers and mentors to Chainikov, and were instrumental to the success of their friend and student over the years.

Critical Review of Grigory Leontievich Chainikov:

Grigoriy Leontievich Chainikov, an artist from Moscow, is a vivid representative of the Russian realistic school of painting. As it seems his peasant's roots determined greatly a direction of his creative activity. And the "creative credo" of his teachers and tutor-guides played in this respect a considerable role. At the beginning it was V.G.Tsyplakov, a well-known artist and a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Arts, later on there were the Academician Artists, brothers Aleksey Petrovich and Sergey Petrovich Tkachevs. Chainikov's paintings always attract attention of the audience at the artistic exhibitions. Looking at them, one sinks into the world of beauty, which is expressed by the artist using traditional esthetic conceptions of Russian people.

Chainikov is an artist of a chamber and lyric mentality. He is strongly attracted by everything that is customarily called eternal and imperishable. One cannot find in his creative activity any thematic paintings with complicated compositional and figurative structures, dominating generalization brought to a universal and global understanding of these or others depicted phenomena. However, it does not witness against any limitation in the range of Chainikov's creative ability. The breadth of his interests is expressed, first of all, in his addressing to different genres -- a landscape, a portrait, everyday sketches, and interiors. And Chainikov would not be a typical Russian artist and a follower of the realistic school of painting if there were no intimacy and poesy in his landscapes, if he did not address himself to people's subject-matter in his everyday sketches. He tries to understand the person's inner world in his portraits. Chainikov is a profoundly Russian artist both in the spirit of his art and in ways of its expression. Without exception, all the paintings of the artist, both large and small, are a kind of a natural outline of the artist's life. His own existence in the world is inseparable from his

Grigory L. Chainikov, “The Boy with a Plough”, 52" x 40½" (132 x 103 cm), 2002,Oil on Canvas 

 artistic perception of human's objective reality. In other words, the art and the life in Chainikov's creative activity are merged together. Living in Moscow, he spends most time of the year in Tver Region, in the House of Creative Activity. "The Academician Summer Cottage" is where he finds materials for his paintings.

Chainikov is a wonderful master of the landscape art. He reveals himself as a master of individual talent with his motives and his own style of painting the nature. He likes the motifs connected with forests, he is also attracted by edges of woods, meadows, surrounded by trees, bands of paths and forest roads, leading one's gaze away inside a painting – "The Violets Have Finished Blossoming" (1992), "The Fallen Leaves" (1996), "The First Flowers" (2001).

The village nature takes a large part in his landscape motifs. He depicts village peasants' log huts, bath houses vividly placed on forest's background and a river running away. His landscapes are full of air, freshness and light. They are warmed up by the artist's live feelings. There is always some mood in them, calm joyful, lyric and epic, sometimes romantic, but one can never see in his pictures a nature of stormy and violent manifestations of feelings and struggle of passions. Chainikov included into his images of nature so much personal overtones that his landscapes are turned into lyrical pieces of poetry.

Chainikov introduces rather actively a person into his pictures; The bulk of the artist's landscapes are built according to the principle of a diagonal composition and it gives a definite dynamics to a painting.  Being a characteristic feature of a Russian landscape, the panoramic composition is also peculiar to many paintings by the artist. The space spread in breadth or going inside turns those fragments of the nature into a resemblance of unbounded expanses.

Speaking about Chainikov's mastery as a landscape painter, his excellent command of a brush as well as his artistic softness, quiet coloring, steadiness and a richness of tonal and color masses should be pointed out.

The artistic conception of Chainikov's material world does not become exhausted with his pictures of nature. A person's image is on the foreground in his creative activity. A portrait as well as a landscape is the main sphere of Chainikov's art. The circle of people portrayed by the artist is rather large – starting from artist and scientists and finishing with village working people. The portraits attract one's attention by the artist's well-disposed attitude towards the depicted persons. He is able to reproduce the mood and a definite emotional state. Chainikov's portraits are, as a rule, intimate and chamber. There is no philosophical depth in them, but there is an assertion of the person's beauty, his appearance and his talent.

Female portraits take a special place in Chainikov's art, they are built in nature and exclude any idealization of the portrayed persons. The artist depicts mainly beautiful women. They are cheerful and merry, sometimes even self-confident. But occasionally one can meet a thoughtful face and a sad look. The artist does not seek in them a similarity, but he is eager to pass an inner essence of his models. And although they are somewhat of the same type according to their interpretation, they are different in their characters and individual originality. Chainikov depicts women's portraits mainly up to their chest on a neutral background. As for men's portraits, they are depicted as a rule in their full size, quietly sitting and the spectator's attention is concentrated on their faces and hands.Many portraits of Chainikov are merged with an everyday genre and still life.  They can be called portrait-pictures. Such a merging favors a  creation of a unified and harmonic artistic image.

 Grigory L. Chainikov, "Returning Home", 26½" x 51" (67 x 129,5 cm), 2004, Oil on Canvas

Chainikov has also revealed himself in the genre art in which the first and even the only place take a Russian village. People's theme passes through all the Russian painting and it is inherent to modern artists. The theme of a village can be also clearly seen in Chainikov's creative activity.

Chainikov is meditative in the genre art. While depicting the village life, he does not estimate it. He neither makes any harsh judgments, nor underlines it, but he shows the life and does it with sympathy, kindness and love. Many of his genre scenes are not deprived of some poetry. Such a meditative and positively poetic understanding of life in Russian art goes back to the followers of Venetianov.

The figures in Chainikov's paintings are static; they sit, stand, but the people are never shown in movement. Their gestures are scanty and all the characters are presented in space. But the space does not dominate in paintings and the accent is given to a figurative part of a composition. Chainikov's models are understood not as "typical characters" or "everlasting heroes" but as concrete and modern persons. And it does not seem to be appropriate and logical in this case to write about the formal and stylish categories used by Chainikov, because the peculiarities of compositional constructions, interpretation of the volume, as well as color and light solutions, pictorial texture and the technique of paint-brush strokes are varied and solve every time differently. Chainikov works also in the interior genre, he paints still life. He has his series of self-portraits and children's portraits.