Nazarov Mikhail Alekseevich - artist. His painting style is regarded as neo-primitivism. Born in a beautiful village, watching the disappearance of Russian villages, he tried to preserve the memory of village life in his paintings. In the last years of his life, his art was revealed at exhibitions and brought unforgettable impressions to connoisseurs of art.
Biography
Mikhail Nazarov was born on May 24, 1927 in the village of Kananikolskoye, Zilair district of Bashkiria. Father and mother were from peasants. The family has never been in poverty. There was always food, even during the war years. We planted several vegetable gardens and a lot of potatoes. They developed virgin lands and sowed bread. They dug everything with a shovel. Mom was an active hostess, never sat idle and made sure that the children were fed, dressed and shod.
Mikhail started working early. He was a blacksmith and bricklayer. The family moved to the Tubinsky mine and Mikhail worked there as a prospector. Throughout the war, he, along with adults, mined gold in the mine. Earning a sack of flour a month was happiness.
After the war, Mikhail was appointed head of the construction of a narrow-gauge railway. They gave me a horse and a tarantass. He drove around and marked the future road. I drew everything I saw. He showed his drawings to the construction director and said that he wanted to go to study. So the road to the world of canvases and paints was outlined, and this road lay through the Bashkir Art and Theater School.
How did I start to draw
It all started at school. From the fifth grade, a wall newspaper was issued. They drew with the whole class, but for some reason Mikhail did not like this hobby, but he liked the sketches for the lessons of geography and natural science. Now waterfalls, now plants. At that time it seemed to him that he was the worst draftsman among the guys, but for some reason the nickname "artist" stuck to him.
The art school gave him not only the science and skill of drawing, but also communication with teachers Alexander Tyulkin and Boris Laletin. Under their influence, the aspiring artist formed his own style of painting.
Becoming
After graduating from art school, Mikhail taught fine arts lessons to children at school. Later he entered the State Art University in Tallinn. There Mikhail plunged into the world of academic drawing. He worked a lot - from eight in the morning to ten in the evening. I wanted to work even on weekends. On Sunday, the workshops were closed, he often climbed through the window, just to work. In the Baltics, the artist felt free. In Russia at that time, much was forbidden and art was dictated. Necessarily in the pictures it was necessary to draw Lenin and Stalin. In M. Nazarov Tallinn felt a special taste for creativity. Ilmar Kimm had a great influence on M. Nazarov at that time.
Rejection and underground period
In 1958 M. Nazarov returned to Ufa. It was filled with new ideas and themes. Living in the city, he still missed the village, his native Kananikolsk, and his memory haunted. So houses, bazaars, rivers, tractors, men in earflaps, women in trapezoidal headscarves, "kananikoltsy", a mine, a scythe, an ax, a hammer and a cart began to appear on canvas. He called the images of people in the paintings "cananic rings".
Over the years, his writing style has perfected, but society did not like it. In those years, many artists suffered from misunderstanding and rejection. It reached the point of outright prohibition and repression of painters.
Mikhail Nazarov did not give up. He drew persistently and taught painting at the Ufa Institute of Arts. Z. Ismagilova. By 1989, Nazarov had written more than 200 paintings, and almost all of them were presented at his first exhibition in Sverdlovsk. But even then, his work was perceived in two ways. In the guest book at the exhibition, some people scolded him terribly and offered to take away all brushes and paints from such an artist and generally not show anyone what he had painted.
As the years passed, the artist's workshop looked more like a repository of canvases. M. Nazarov never aspired to become famous. His living canvases were waiting in the wings and waited.
At the last exhibition in his life, Miras, he talked about the painting. He was looking for the size of the white to black ratio. He started from the left side - from the cross. The cross was first painted as the frame of a village window. It came from memory that the basis of the window frame in a peasant hut is a cross. Just forgotten long ago. Then it seemed that the cross would be lonely, and a random pattern appeared on the right. According to the author, the sizes of black and white in the picture are guessed exactly. This picture is perceived as a whole composition, because one color supports the other and prevents two objects from separating.
The artist recalls his feelings while walking through the village. He noticed that when you walk along the street, it seems that you are not walking, but houses are walking and moving with you. This is what became the basis for the design in the pictures with houses.
The composition "Life-Being of Zinka Pustylnikova" is dedicated to Aunt Zinaida Methodievna. She was presented at the Sverdlovsk exhibition. A flattering response for M. Nazarov was written about her in the guest book. The lines said that if the artist painted only this picture, it alone would be enough to admire him.
All of Nazarov's works are a conversation about life and life, about the "life" that the "sixties" portrayed. The artist's heroes are real kananikoltsy, only their faces and figures seem to be cut out. The pictures seem to say that life is hard and harsh.
You can do it yourself - teach others
He devoted more than a quarter of a century to teaching painting to students. Many became folk and honored artists of the Republic of Bashkiria:
Remembering the teacher, they say kind words about him. At the Miras exhibition, Amir Mazitov said: “For me he is so Bashkir and Socrates, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Herodotus all rolled into one. He can very simply say about some deep, sublime things …"
Students sought to get exactly to him for painting courses. There were legends about him among artists. He attracted and mesmerized with stories about his homeland, about Bashkiria, about painters of all times. The young people caught his every word, already realizing that they were communicating with a real master.
Mysterious trail
Each era gives rise to innovative trends. A new word in painting was destined to say to two masters of Bashkiria: Mikhail Nazarov and Akhmat Lutfullin. In the 70s, both artists were heavily criticized. Nazarov - for avant-gardism, Lutfullin - for realism. But criticism does not negate the essence of creativity. The bottom line was that their painting was permeated with anxiety for the fate of the village peasant, pain about the earth.
M. Nazarov understood that human memory cannot preserve much. He remembered the picturesque beauty of his native village, surrounded by a pine forest for tens of kilometers. He swam in the clear river Kana, where a red fish came to spawn - the krasulya. He could not change anything in the life process. Everything disappeared and collapsed. Forests were cut down, the river was polluted, and fish disappeared. People were dispersed, abandoned houses were rotting. All I could was to express and preserve my many years of experience in paintings.
M. A. Nazarov passed away at 93. Until the last days he painted in the studio. He painted 3 pictures a day. His paintings are simple and naive only at first glance. Each picture reflects Nazarov's world: the village and the Universe. M. Nazarov for many years pushed and defended his pictorial language. He, a village boy from the Zilair district, managed to root the shoots of informal - abstract art, which for many still remains a mystery.
