About Friends, art, contemporary...
The theme of colors, the question of what to capture and in what way in order “not to stare at a freshly stretched canvas scratching one’s head” occupied Dmitry Shuvalov all the way back in his student days. He used to tell how he would agonize over the choice of colors, trying to convey the healthy complexion of a sitting model, while the teacher achieved the desired effect effortlessly, choosing a modest English red in lieu of more expensive paints (cad- miums or alizarins). “The paint went down so perfectly that it was obvious: the blood had run to her cheeks!” This experience served as the impetus toward serious study of the technical theory of painting. Shuvalov began looking for the answers to his questions in the writings and paintings of the old masters. He pondered: how had the old masters themselves taught and learned? They began as apprentices, after all, they saw all the stages of their teachers’ work and did all the “dirty work”: they grated the pigments, prepared the panels and canvases, boiled the glue, applied the base coat, copied…
They knew the colors “backwards and forwards.” Our pigments, on the other hand, are all ready made, and the master mixes them in his own studio, rarely revealing recipes. So the master is on his own, as is the student. The student, as if possessed by or enamored of nature, throws himself into efforts to record his fading idea of the image; in the end, by trial and error, working empirically, “by his guts” he manages a not altogether satisfactory result and wraps up the work, “so as not to beat it to death” (Dmitry’s expression). Shuvalov compared painting to music: “There are notes, tempos, concert pitch, octaves, and all the rest. What do we have? Painters have seven colors — how’s that different from an octave of seven sounds? And a white sheet of paper or a canvas, the gold of a palette or, say, a spot of sunlight — how is that different from concert pitch?” A box of watercolors he would enthusiastically call it your piano! He would call on us: “Listen to the colour!” Listen, for example, to black with cadmium orange, with “lemon,” or listen to any mixture or color at all… Ivory Black! The color Dmitry loved so tenderly! When speaking of its virtues he called it his black. He painted all his Murmansk etudes in black, all their lightest parts — the sky and the water, the wet boardwalks reflecting the white northern sky, the shine of the fish in the carts and barrels, the glints on the fishmongers’ coats, the white of the hawsers in the light — i.e. the light on the whiteness. Dark areas under illumination were done with ultramarine, which is more colorful than a medium cobalt blue. Shadows, if done simply, were painted with Leningrad natural umber — another color he loved and valued highly; if they were more complex, they’d be done with Parisian blue or Prussian blue mixed with a golden ochre and crimson or with a medium or dark cadmium yellow. Parisian blue came in tin cans. We would spread the paint out on newspapers in order to free the pigment from excess oils and get a usable paste — otherwise the paint would run when you put it on the palette… We stuffed it back in the empty tubes and, putting them in our painter’s case, could head out on studies fully armed. But then we found out that Pyotr Konchalovsky would make his own paints and then fill paper tubes with them. How much lighter our painter’s cases would be if they were stocked with paper tubes!
Returning to the idea of “painting as a science,” I must in any case say that I don’t recall exactly whether Dmitry called his logically constructed painting system a science — probably not; whether he was simply too busy or was too modest by nature, it’s hard to say. In all his paintings one sees the purity of every stroke, the firm, sure brush directed by an elevated spirit, an elevated mind, an elevated taste, “a rapture, a rush, and a cultured sen- sitivity!” (Michail Vrubel). Shuvalov’s system or, rather, his painting method crystallized gradually, but it came out of the “infamous” tricolor: red, blue, and yellow. The blues are obvious. There are ochre reds, cadmium reds, crimson reds, etc.; the ochre yellows, cadmium yellows… there are your three colors! Take them, mix them, like in music, take chords — only don’t add in more than three, not counting whites and blacks if you need something neutral, or else you’ll end up with sludge, mud…
You could talk about Dmitry Shuvalov endlessly: about his talent, beauty, goodness, his voice, his ability to love people (as he put it “I am an alcoholic of human relations”), yet there’s another one, so very subtle: in matters of color he had perfect pitch!!!
With love and rapture.