There are those days when there is absolutely no mood for drawing. Everybody has them, and big, serious artists, too: either their head suddenly ached, then there is no mood, or some urgent matters prevent them from concentrating. At such moments, the symbols of creative being help very much: reproductions of favorite paintings, cute soulful souvenirs, visiting exhibitions, an example of a familiar master-teacher.
Alexander Ivanov, the great russian classical artist, academician, in his youth, after graduating from the Academy of Arts, during his retirement trip abroad, made a pencil sketch-a copy of Raphael's "Sistine Madonna". This drawing was pinned to the wall in the artist's studio all his life, as a reminder of how to write, what should be the real art.
And a little more than 100 years later, in the 1940s, Igor Grabar, who led the restoration workshops of the Tretyakov gallery at that time, and took echelons with works of art confiscated by the nazis, took in the hungry and cold Moscow priceless treasures of Europe. Among them was the same”Sistine Madonna". On hands brought in workshops, and met it, employees having bent heads, and having removed caps, despite the january frost, as a shrine. Because for people knowledgeable-it's not just a masterpiece of painting, and a symbol of creativity.
Otherwise, why do it at all, if you do not strive for the great and beautiful, if you do not feel the vibration, pulse, breath of the artist through his work.
I have in the studio for a long time hung a reproduction of the” Trinity " Rublev - it gave me strength, even when they were not. It was worth looking at these smooth inclined figures, at this pure piercing blue color and peace filled the heart, and there was confidence that I could do something, and I am an artist, if I feel all this, albeit small and far from the world in which he created the greatest russian master iconographer, but to be a part of him. And then, a few years later I hugged the church of the Intercession-on-Nerl in Bogolyubovo, so familiar from photographs and reproductions. I just wanted to hug her, as a living, native person and a small church said to me soaked in the warm hot summer sun, the pinkish stone. Now the postcard with the image of this church reminds me of my mission and helps me to gather my thoughts in difficult working moments.
This is how artists of the past help us, the artists of the present, pass the magic baton of creativity, inspire drawing classes. And if you do not yet have such a “totem” artist or painting, it does not matter: then your meeting is still ahead. And it is sure to happen, you'll see, is only to open an album with reproductions or go to the Museum - a local, albeit small and familiar from childhood, or large, known throughout the world, albeit virtually, with the help of Internet excursions. The main thing is to look, to study painting, graphics, architecture, sculpture with all the fibers of the soul, to be open to a new inspiring impulse.
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