«To paint a picture, you need experience in working with hands and paints, and the most difficult thing in modern art is to use simple materials. Therefore, many people try to go into the field of experiments, neglecting simple means and give a fairly average result. A painting is the result of a complex process consisting of certain stages. Step by step, the artist discovers for himself the stages of involvement in art, layering on himself the observation of other artists and discovering his possibilities associated with his own psyche and physical data. Artists learn from each other, processing what they see in their own work. Everyone inevitably goes through stages of imitation of the great before finding their own handwriting. In fact, not everyone can withstand it even physically: health, a firm hand and much more are needed. Not all desires coincide with technical capabilities. Therefore, it is wrong to rely only on energy and expression in creativity. To create a work of art, many life moments, including education, must coincide.»

«In mathematics, completeness is sacrificed for the sake of consistency, because the latter is obviously a necessary thing in mathematics. For art, it is the completeness of coverage that is more important. Therefore the presence of contradictory and even mutually exclusive elements is permissible in a piece of art. In the process of creating an art work, several possible ways of its development arise from time to time. Which of them is the best you generally know, but not always sure, so you need to work out all possible options. This is the way to create an art work. In order to make art from painting, an artist has to start not from life, but from another art, for example, from an action, in which reality is already somehow formulated and prepared for the next step. It is in this way that painting can move from the state of «semi-art», which it is, to the rank of art.»

«An artist is, first of all, the world. If there is no world, he is simply an artisan. It is impossible to create your own world artificially. I am a person who believes in something higher, which undoubtedly exists. I cannot give it a name, somehow characterize it, find There is a word in the dictionary that would define these sensations of mine. There is something in the world that we do not see, smell, or touch, but somehow, probably with our hearts, we feel it. Therefore, I am inclined to believe that any true art, always religious.And here we are talking not only about Rembrandt with his “Prodigal Son” and other religious subjects.And Van Gogh? And Sisley? Aren’t they religious in their own way? Every artist who has a genuine gift is religious. All my art is about a person. Even in my landscapes, a person is always present and is the main character. It just dissolved somewhere and is there invisibly, or somewhere beyond the edge. The most incomprehensible secret is the secret of man. Art reflects a hint of a solution».

“We need to stop and remember about artistic prayer. All thoughts, fears and premonitions, anger, sexuality, everything “I want”, “I can”, “give”, “take”, pop up, become more obvious, line up in combinations. Sometimes there are correlations paradoxical. Sometimes something appears from the depths that causes a very strong shock and experience. So strong that it is impossible not to try to recreate it in the material. The stronger the experience, the better it is connected, on the one hand, with the primary impulse, and on the other, with the way in which the viewer recognizes this experience, passing through many difficulties, just as a female fish lays many more eggs than in The male is able to fertilize, and even fewer fry appear. For me, “experience” is not only a sensory category, but with it comes knowledge…»

«At the certain moment od my life, I realized that art is like a thread — twisted from very different, disparate things: fragments of visual and emotional memory, hereditary patterns, acquired skills, physical motor skills, material and fictional entities («line» is a «thread» on Latin, linen thread). In addition to everything, this is also another chronology. After all, when you get into your own zone of art, another time countdown begins, that does not tolerate haste. And when you are on this notorious vaporetto, it is also impossible to rush with it. It still won’t take you anywhere faster, its speed is approximately equal to the speed of a pedestrian. You can completely immerse yourself in contemplation or reflection. The route, of course, is always a given thing, but you can go on this route without knowing
exactly where you will end up, and choose which direction you want to move and how much to drive. Thus, predetermination is combined with freedom and unpredictability. And creativity itself for me is an eternal search for a balance between control and randomness».

The art of Valery Svetlitsky is difficult to attribute to a specific specific movement. Undoubtedly, abstract expressionism is close to him. His works suggest deep meditation and concentration, which, in particular, is stimulated by the artist’s very hand-made “sacred act”, the nature of the brush’s touch to the canvas. Every stroke of his painting is like a trace of the author’s breath, evidence of the flow of thoughts and feelings, the topography of experience. It is not objects and not their fragments, not fragments of materialized ideas that occupy the artist, but secret hidden connections, “fields of tension” that form between them.

Vitaly Patsyukov

«Art is of great importance in my life. For me it is like breath and food: my daily entertainment and a certain meaning of existence. My works represent a kind of journey into the world of art, endless experiments with color, form, materials and artistic movements. This a constant search for his own recognizable signs and his own style that could satisfy me. However, the artist cannot be satisfied with his work, he must search and look for ways of new artistic expression and form his own visual means.»

«It is very important for me to communicate with people closed to me in spirit — to be on the same wavelength with them. But this communication should not be during my work. If people come to me, I will not work, even if I feel comfortable and good with them. I will drink tea with them, communicate, but after that, in order to continue working, I must be left alone. But at the same time, I can’t stay alone in the workshop for a long time. I need people, need normal human communication. I work mainly on the floor, creating objects from carpets, rubber, used shoes, fur, and tar — connecting these strange, unrelated objects into the idea of ​​​​ethno and techno. I don’t need a lot of colors these days. The world will not remain the same. Difficult times is coming, which will lead to the impoverishment of the population. When the people overcome this burden, nostalgia for the truly valuable things will arise again. Inflated names will no longer be in demand, but really strong and good artists of the level of serious museums will be back to the forefront.»

«In the modern world, an artist is a very diverse concept. This is not only a person who uses a pencil and a sheet or canvas and oil in his work. Today, a huge field is open for artists to realize their potential. Creation of installations, art objects, performances — all this art. And, as a rule, it is difficult for creative people to limit themselves to a single instrument. It is, perhaps, like offering a person to choose one thing from all the organs, the most important. Everything is important equally, and if we have the opportunity to use all the «tools», then it is foolish to refuse it. In today’s fast-paced world, many people are so immersed in their problems, worries and deeds that sometimes they forget about how multifaceted and amazing the world around us is. A high-quality work of art, no matter what format and what tools the author has chosen, can touch the most delicate strings of the human soul, draw attention to important topics, and teach you to notice the beauty around.»

«…it is useless and boring to depict reality, because reality itself is no longer capable of satisfying the author’s desire to remain truly true to one’s own nature. Trivial the environment gives way to the artist’s imagination, which can be briefly summarized come from the conclusion of the Five Correct Rules. It is thanks to them (the rules) we comprehend the spiritual essence of color, line, sound, smell.»

«I work with industrial architecture and industrial aesthetics. I create my own collection of objects, in which each picture is a separate architectural «portrait». My artistic practice is a kind of diary of memories in which I move from one industrial object to another and endow them with my psycho-emotional experiences. I combine a rigid and extremely clear functional construction, in which there is nothing superfluous, with a recollection of the time of the year and the mood of a particular period of time in space.I want to show that industrial architecture can be beautiful and give the viewer the opportunity to reconsider their attitude to the industrial landscape, to see harmony and expression in it.»

“Everything, that is visible, carries a hidden aesthetic, and the task of the artist is to see and release it. There is nothing random in the world around us, all real objects carry not only everyday meaning, but are also a kind of «aesthetic codes». The bearer of such aesthetic codes is the space of the city: the walls of houses, paint stains, drainpipes, road markings, gratings and much more. I really like the combination of man-made and non-man-made, that is, when there is some kind of predictable geometry, as well as completely unpredictable. But the two ideal components of the picture for me personally still have a miraculous nature — this is the sky and snow. Otherwise, any little thing can hook me — a spot, a line, proportions».

“Painting is a mystery, like life, although sometimes it seems to me that it’s hard labor, when everything is molded as if by itself. I try to speak the language of painting, constructing my phrases without falsehood, and I don’t consider it necessary to follow fashion in art, which often leads to the gates of absurdity and emptiness in a glossy package. In the new century, people “free” from prejudices took it upon themselves to change everything. The indisputable in art turned out to be shaken. Despite the fact that today in the fine arts it is typical to eliminate barriers between types of art, I do not see it for myself the need to mix one with the other.I am a painter who works in a traditional manner. Sometimes the pictorial surface of a painting excites me more than even the idea displayed on a piece of canvas. For me, the emotion is important not only from a plot, composition, structure that catches my attention, but equally important is the emotion from the painting surface and the texture of the strokes of oil paints. In a sense, a painting is a SIGN, a concentrated thought, and not a servant of literature.»

“I became an artist by accident, it’s just that my parents were artists. My creativity began with the firm conviction that I would definitely never be an artist. To finally be convinced of this, at the age of 13 I began to enter the Moscow secondary art school, although all my nature was against it. It so happened that I entered, and this event determined my entire future fate. I paint what surrounds me, what is near and dear to me, what I love very much and what I value very much. This is my family, children, people close to me, my comrades, fellow artists. These are the places where I grew up, my hometown of Moscow, with its wonderful boulevards, which I fell in love with for their warmth and sincerity. This is Rostov the Great, which became my second hometown, these are small ancient Russian cities that are close to my heart, which also became my own. There are many places that I love…»

“Painting saved me from everything: madness, suicide, defeat — which means it has a life-giving force. Art is the meaning of existence, because the artist is the one who cannot help but draw. For those who draw, when called, this is craft. All the heroes of my works are professional models. I painted men, but they are less interesting to me. The female body is very plastic, it is like a flower. I prefer to draw naked women, because they are very beautiful. I have been accused of both lesbianism and feminism, but I’m indifferent to all this, painting replaces everything for me.”

«As I see itd, the world is divided into different levels — behind the visible chaos, in fact, there is its own, special order. My works are diverse: painting, relief, and various objects, but they are united by a common line — patterns and elements that repeat from work to work. In this way, we get order even where it seemed there could not be. What I tried and constantly try to express in my art is inspired by the place where I live — Dagestan. I’m just trying to formulate something what you once heard or saw. Nature, people, cities, crafts, architecture and even religion — all this is united by a common pattern. Such is the order. «

«Any kind of art is a means of communication between the creator, the artist and the people around him. The work took place if it evoked emotions in the viewer. Most often, my paintings are about happiness and about its search. The world around us, flora and fauna are a priori happy, and only man is the only a being on earth who needs to seek this state.I think that the understanding that we are also part of this planet, closer communication with its other inhabitants will open the way to the desired happiness for many.In my paintings, I use not only the language of images, but also the language of color combinations that evoke positive emotions in the beholder. I often draw inspiration from the Impressionists, I admire their ability to convey a sense of joy from life. I use them with finds of color combinations that affect the mind of the beholder».

«The basis of everything is respect for the life and its source, whatever that means in every way. Abstract art has neither beginning nor end, it is transcendent in its essence. Static as such does not exist, because everything flows and everything changes. It means that any fragment is dead in its essence. Abstraction allows movement and searching for meanings, it is a collective image in which you can find a huge number of elements. Even realistic painting is a reflection of the author, not reality. An abstract work is an artist’s emotion expressed in a particular form, and each viewer can find something of his own in it.
By and large, everything that surrounds us is an abstraction. Even feelings and emotions do not have a single unaltered definition».

«You can paint pictures today only if you cannot help but paint them. Although, perhaps, at all times it was something like this, but now the question is tougher. In the era of print runs and clones, creating something unique is generally a movement against the current. I was born and have lived in Moscow all my life. It so happened that my environment from early childhood was an artistic environment. At different times I had the opportunity to communicate with Moscow artists of various generations and trends. You can say that these meetings have influenced what I can do. Well, my education is the most «academic» artistic. However, what is a Moscow artist? Moscow has long become the New Babylon, where everything in the world is mixed and digested. Here everything is the newest and most fashionable, and at the same time, historical antiquity, patriarchy that goes deep into the soil».

«In my opinion, in the public space of recent times, we have very much lost the thread of meanings. The sinister beauty that surrounded us is becoming more powerful and meaningless. The feeling is that there is a lot of everything and everything is beautiful, but after viewing, for example, a thousand posters, you fall into melancholy «everything is the same. Even the plastic moves are the same. And what’s next? This question worries me for a long time. I started as a theater artist and was brought up on an old-school Polish poster, which is essentially a metaphor. At the beginning, I tried to use symbols that would be understandable without words and would contain compressed meanings. However, over time, an interesting fact was discovered: the subsequent decoding of characters by the viewer does not always coincide with the original encoding that the artist had in mind. At the same time, the power of the word in communication cannot be overestimated. Sometimes you don’t even need to visualize and draw anything, because it is in the words that the whole meaning lies».

“It so happened that since childhood, drawing has become for me a means of communication and a way of studying the world around me, which is contradictory and beautiful. The millennia-long history of human culture has created a huge layer of beautiful works of art, almost limitless for man to study during his earthly life. For this reason, I have always been interested in working in different artistic directions. In my works I try to build some kind of sacred structure, to find an artistic image of the timeless reality of existence, to express through the means of painting what cannot be written in words. Also an important part of my life is teaching, which for me is inseparable from my creativity. I try not only to pass on to my students the academic knowledge that I have received myself, but also to develop in them an interest in independently searching for new forms of artistic and plastic self-expression.”

“I never set out to destroy something, because the medium of contemporary art (avant-garde, surrealism, new figurativeness) was my native one, and academic art was something second. I always liked antiquity and archaeological artifacts in museums more than realistic art painting, which seemed equally brown and boring to me. However, I understood that I needed to study — not in order to become an artist (I did not intend to become one), but in order to make art. At the same time, spontaneous drawing was going on, which as a result was combined with the educational drawing. And there are no contradictions between these two directions, since they have one common basis: composition, light and shade, space and volume.»

«The process of artistic creation is unique and individual. It reflects the personality of the artist and is difficult to be analyzed and generalized. It seems to me that this is a process that combines in different proportions moments of life and reaction to the surrounding, subjective fantasies and emotional experiences of the artist, which reflect his inner world. The artist loves his viewer, works for him and tries to discuss with him the problems that surround the viewer. Contemporary art is full of contradictions. Trying through his personal position to tell the viewer about the modern world a little more than the viewer sees with his own eyes, the artist thinks that he is pushing the boundaries in the mind of the beholder. Actively interacting with the viewer and immersing him in the mystery of the creative process, he makes him an accomplice and co-author of what is happening, forms new meanings, tries to rethink reality and force him to support his ideas».

«Contemporary art is what is happening here and now. If you and I decided to make a time-capsule, then all shades of art directions and schools would naturally get in it. This days we can unambiguously trace the «boiling points» and a certain groups formed around and next to certain centers of gravity. Of course, this does not lie on the surface, but  if we look at the whole, these are large institutions such as the State Center of Modern Art, the School of Contemporary Art, the Rodchenko School «, Moscow State Art Institute named after Surikov, Moscow Institute of Arts named after Stroganov, VGIK and so on. These institutions have their own art world, very rich and strong. All of them have their own adherents, Gods, and “Achilles heels”. And this is what I have always been interested in.Tthis is what I see as an interesting feature and perspective for the development of Moscow contemporary art.”

«I am a freelance artist! If we talk about education, I graduated from Moscow State Pedagogical University named after Lenin with a degree in designer. Now I am a private designer in interiors, fashion, book graphics, and in many areas I am self-taught. I am a member of the professional union of artists of Russia and engaged in creating unique works for unique people: souvenirs, graphics, paintings, panels and interiors».