Vladimir Golub

Vladimir Golub 1, 2, 3



"Vladimir GOLUB was born in 1953 in a small town of Slutsk, Byelorussia. Still a teenager he knew for sure that he would be a painter. When he was 12 he left his parents` home to enter an All-Byelorussian Music and Fine Arts School. Later Vladimir entered the Easel-Painting Department of Byelorussian Academy of Arts. He graduated from it in 1977 acquiring in this way the best professional artistic education available in his country.At the very start of his creative activity Golub, like many of his contemporaries, experienced the expansion of the official Soviet art on the one hand, and the emasculation of late avant-garde on the other. It made him search for his own style. Currently his style represents a combination of realism and fantasy. Inspired by the images of West-Slavic mythology, the painter created his own symbolic-allegorical landscape inhabited by the Spirits of Nature. Success came to the original master of fantastic imagination early. Museums paid for his pictures much more than for the ones offered by other Byelorussian painters. Famous art critics wrote about him in the "Mastatstva" magazine issued under the auspices of the Byelorussian Ministry of Culture. Polish, Lithuanian and German papers and magazines on arts also published pictures of works by Golub more than once. Now the painter and his family live in Vilnius. There he co-operates with local art galleries. He often leaves Vilnius for Poland to take part in plain-airs or for Grodno, an ancient town in Byelorussia, to work in the tranquil atmosphere of his first studio where 20 years ago he conceived a series of ancestor myths.In 1999 on the occasion of opening his regular personal exhibition in Grodno Vladimir Golub was given a medal "For services to fine arts", the highest award of the Byelorussian Union of Artists.Fantastic allusions in the majority of his landscapes are infinite. Especially where the transformed character of real female nature turns into an indirect image of elemental natural forces.A roguishly graceful model of Golub with her lustrous eyes implying a mystery known only to herself, sloping shoulders, long white neck and half-naked breast immediately attracts spectators` attention. The painter's open personal liking for the model that shows in the picture softens the sorcerous shade of the image of excessively blooming female beauty. The painter is very courteous to, even indulging for his ideal of femininity in a man-like way, he is ruptured and charmed by it. "Healthy like winter, joyful like spring, industrious lake summer, and rich like autumn" [Valachobnya pesni (Laudatory songs). Bartashevich G.A. Sadavey. Mn.Navuka i tech. 1980] - in this poetic key of a laudatory ritual song the painter idealises his beloved spouse. Now she is "like an apple-tree in an orchard", now "a peahen beauty" or "the lady of the manor" where the manor represents the entire world." ... more

Brian Hoover

Brian Hoover

"I find the idea of a prescribed orderly world very mundane .To me, the strangeness of dreams, enigma and the vastness of the unknowable universe, are proof that we are perhaps part of something very big and completely beyond our comprehension. These ideas are part of my own spiritual philosophy and play an important part in my artistic exploration.

A lot of the imagery I come up with is derived from dreams. For several years I have been very regimental about keeping a dream diary by my bedside. I found if you don't scribble some very simple notes down about a dream soon after you wake from it, you'll forget it by morning. Houses, both strange and familiar, are reoccurring themes in my dreams, as well as elemental things such as wind, water and fire. I am aware of the Jungian impulse to interpret these things outright, but I am equally satisfied to be awed by the seemingly infinite and unknowable well that they originate from."

Brian Hoover

Catherine Alexandre

Catherine Alexandre

"Art is Alchemy

Creating, one takes part in the UNIVERSAL CREATION, and oneself construts, little by little... step by step. The little work joins, in a infinite approach, the "OPUS MAGNUM"... "

Catherine Alexandre