Previously I wrote about the Russian artist Natalya Tsarkova, who works in the Vatican, but now
I present our artist from Yekaterinburg, who has been working in Monaco for the second decade.
Lately, more and more people have been writing about the work of the artist Georgy Shishkin abroad. Prestigious newspapers and magazines devote serious analytical articles to his paintings.
They invariably note the master’s focus on people, on the inner content
personality, on her mission on earth. Lord Alistair McAlpine, a Sotheby's consultant, having visited his exhibition in Paris in 1995, dedicated an article to him entitled “An Artist Capturing the Mystery of Russia.”

Georgy Shishkin (born 1948)

Since 1980, Georgy Shishkin has given preference to pastel, which has given him great freedom.
And three years later, he invented an original method for preparing the base for pastels, guaranteeing their strong adhesion. This method allowed the artist to expand the possibilities of pastels, as well as write pastels in unusually large formats.
In 1988, the artist moved to Moscow and got married. His first exhibition in Paris took place in 1993; the artist’s stay in France brought him meetings with “old Russians,” pushed the artist to a deeper study of the true history of Russia and gave him new impetus to continue the cycle “ Russian dreams."
Begun in Russia, this cycle was most fully realized in France. Although, as many critics note, the form and humanistic traditions of the Russian land were and remain the spiritual support for the artist.
“It was here that many of my thoughts about Russian, about the Russian soul, our sincerity, our spirituality were developed. I believe that in Europe there was an inaccurate idea about many Russian traits. I wanted, frankly, to try to correct it.”
In 1999, Shishkin became a laureate of the Taylor Foundation Grand Prix.

I. Smoktunovsky

Portrait master Georgy Shishkin - author of a series of portraits of creative
people: Boris Shtokolov, Elena Gogoleva, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Yuri Solomin, Jean Marais, Inna Churikova, Gleb Panfilov, Gerard Depardieu... The famous French art critic and poet Andre Verde, a friend of Picasso and Chagall, wrote:
“Without exaggeration, I regard Georgy Shishkin as one of the best portrait painters I know in Europe. His amazing skill is based on the emphasized sensitivity of technique, in which the very mystery of painting slides.”

Jean Marais

A citizen of Russia and a resident of the Principality of Monaco since 1998, when he was invited to paint a portrait of the prince, the artist took part in many charity events in favor of sick children in Russia.
Prince Albert II of Monaco wrote: “The painting of Georgy Shishkin is a haven of poetry in a world where dreams are often absent. I am glad that this artist of great talent chose the Principality for his art.”

Paintings by Georgy Shishkin from the series “Russian Dreams” - a diptych: “Farewell” and “Birth”, are exhibited in the Monaco Cathedral, and Georgy Shishkin also participates in exhibitions dedicated to Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet.
The works of Georgy Shishkin are in museums and private collections in many countries around the world,
in particular, in the Princely Palace of Monaco, in the collections of Luciano Pavarotti, Lord Barclay. Valued as a specialist in interiors, he carried out a series of paintings for the Presidential Palace
United Arab Emirates (2003-2005).

Marina Tsvetaeva

Patriarch Alexy II

Archbishop Valentin

Portrait of a woman

Actress E. Gogoleva

Cycle of paintings "Russian Dreams"

Two postage stamps issued in Monaco for the centenary"Russian ballet
Diaghilev", created by Russian artist Georgy Shishkin.

The artist at the painting "Time of Troubles" (Boris Godunov 2006)

About the artist:

Georgy Shishkin (1948) - artist and architect, master of modern portraiture, author of the series of paintings “Russian Dreams”.
Graduate of the Ural Academy of Architecture and Art in 1975; member of the Union of Artists of the USSR since 1985, author of the lamps for the Historical Square of Yekaterinburg (1974) and the interior of the museum of the Academic Opera and Ballet Theater of Yekaterinburg (1983-1985); author of a series of portraits of creative people; author of a series of paintings for the interiors of the UAE Presidential Palace (2003-2005);
author of a number of postage stamps of the Principality of Monaco.

Georgy Georgievich Shishkin(born January 25, 1948, Sverdlovsk) - Russian artist who developed his own special technique with an original method of preparing the base for pastel, author of the “Russian Dreams” series of paintings, the triptych “Dedication to Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet”, master of modern portraiture, author of postage stamps of Monaco and Russia. Lives and works in Moscow since 1988, in Paris since 1993 and in the Principality of Monaco since 1995.

Biography

Georgy Shishkin was born in 1948 in Sverdlovsk (formerly and now Yekaterinburg) in the family of a violinist musician (first violin of the orchestra of the Sverdlovsk Theater of Musical Comedy), a veteran of the Great Patriotic War Georgy Ivanovich Shishkin, a participant in the heroic battles for Stalingrad (Tsaritsyn), who was seriously wounded. The boy lost his father early.

Mother Galina Kuzminichna (née Kushnina) worked at the Uralgiprorud design institute as a civil engineer and became a leading specialist in economics.

His grandfather Ivan Methodievich Shishkin moved to Yekaterinburg from the Vyatka province.

From the age of six, Georgy Shishkin studied violin at a music school, but “he was already sure that he had to become an artist,” he constantly drew.

As a child, Georgy was strongly influenced by the atmosphere of his great-grandfather and great-grandmother (on his mother’s side), a house with Russian traditions preserved during the Soviet era. His great-grandfather, whom Georgy knew, went blind before the age of twenty, Efim Ivanovich Korabelshchikov, was a doctor in the Russian army. The house, surrounded by a garden and vegetable garden, was demolished in 1968, and a faceless dormitory building was built in its place.

Grandmother Anna Efimovna Kushnina (nee Korabelshchikova), who raised her grandson, worked at home as a seamstress-fashion designer. As a girl, she studied with a French seamstress and fashion designer. Her parents, peasants of pre-revolutionary Russia, who with their labor created a small but strong farm, paid for their daughter’s studies in gold, a significant amount for those times. On the eve of the First World War, their condition allowed them to enroll in the category of merchants of the 1st guild.

Anna Efimovna sang in a church choir in her youth. She loved opera. Creative people loved to gather in her hospitable house (the room left to her from their 4-room apartment after evacuees from Ukraine moved in during the war). Anna Efimovna sang romances, accompanying herself on the guitar. She remained a widow with two young children in her arms after in 1937 Kuzma Petrovich Kushnin, a mechanical engineer, an outstanding specialist in the reconstruction of Ural factories, while working at Uralmashzavod, “died under a tram while returning from work.” This version is not confirmed in reality: there is no his grave in the city cemetery. Later, the grandmother recalled that recently, before his disappearance, a person had been following him. Kuzma Petrovich came from the Kushnin family, known before the revolution in Tyumen, hospitable and famous for its charity. His father Pyotr Stepanovich Kushnin loved horses and kept stables.

At the age of ten, Georgy Shishkin entered the Art School at the Sverdlovsk Art School, where his teacher was the artist Nikolai Moos, who later became a famous graphic artist and illustrator of Russian fairy tales. Georgy graduated from art school with honors in 1963, among the three best graduates, having received a recommendation to continue his studies. But, at the insistence of his relatives, he entered the Construction College.

Then he worked for two years in the architectural studio of the chief architect of Uralgipromez (Ural State Institute for the Design of Metallurgical Plants) Boris Viktorovich Gulyaev. An architect and artist, an encyclopedic educated person, Gulyaev became his teacher and friend for a long time (until his death in 1984). They went to sketches together (both in the rain and in the cold) and discussed the problems of art. It was Gulyaev who strongly advised the young man to continue his studies.

In 1975 he graduated from the Sverdlovsk Architectural Institute, a branch of the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArhI), (now the Ural State Academy of Architecture and Art), where leading artists of the Urals taught at that time. During his studies (1969-1975), he traveled with a sketchbook to the ancient cities of Russia. Alone or together with a friend - a young art history teacher Anri Yuryevich Kaptikov, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, one of the best experts on Russian architecture, who revealed to him a whole series of visions of ancient Rus'. In the Assumption Cathedral of Vladimir, Georgy was impressed by the frescoes of Andrei Rublev.

The exhibition of Georgy Shishkin brings together his main artistic cycles: “Russian Dreams”, which was shown in the nineties at exhibitions in Paris, Cannes, Monaco, etc. and brought fame to the artist, paintings about the Russian ballet of S. Diaghilev, a number of works on subjects of Russian history and portraits of famous actors and ballet dancers, including Jean Marais, Gerard Depardieu, Inna Churikova, Milorad Miskovic and others.

The uniqueness of Shishkin's heroes lies in the desire to embody their sensitivity and subtlety of the inner world. Thanks to the author's painting technique, Shishkin was able to paint large-format paintings in pastels, and with the help of a special author's technique to capture the lightness and emotionality of the subjects of the world of ballet.

Today Shishkin lives and works in Monaco, Paris, and participates in charity projects. The exhibition at the Russian Museum is the artist’s return to Russia.

The exhibition in the halls of the Engineering (Mikhailovsky) Castle includes more than 50 works of painting and a number of works from private collections.

The exhibition was prepared with the support of the Sistema Charitable Foundation.

The opening of the exhibition will take place at 16:00.

Lately, more and more people have been writing about the work of the artist Georgy Shishkin abroad. Prestigious newspapers and magazines devote serious analytical articles to his paintings. They invariably note the master’s focus on man, on the inner content of the individual, on his mission on earth. The heroes of Georgy Shishkin’s paintings, be it the brilliant Diaghilev, the romantic Jean Marais, the solemnly detached Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' Alexy II, or just a young beauty from a Dutch cafe, seem to be pronouncing a continuous monologue. The artist's exhibitions are successfully held in Monte Carlo and Paris, in Hamburg and Versailles, in Cannes and Wiesbaden, just as they were previously held in Tyumen and Moscow, Irbit and Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), the homeland of George. “Georgy Shishkin’s credo can be stated in a few words,” says the famous French art critic Pierre-Marc Leverjoie. “It lies in the fact that it is necessary to consider each person, in essence, as a neighbor in an imaginary archipelago of brotherhood.” RUSSIAN DREAMS by artist Georgy Shishkin Begun in Russia, this cycle was most fully realized in France. Although, as many critics note, the form and humanistic traditions of the Russian land were and remain the spiritual support for the artist. A characteristic moment that quite fully reveals Georgy Shishkin’s views on life and work is the artist’s refusal (despite all the tightness of funds, an indispensable companion of creativity) from a tempting financial offer from the owner of one of the art galleries in Paris. This proposal consisted in the fact that Georgy and his wife Tatyana were given an apartment in Paris, all his paintings were immediately bought, but on the condition that the artist would paint Paris. “And at that time I was working on the continuation of “Russian Dreams,” says Georgy Shishkin. - It was here that many of my thoughts about Russian, about the Russian soul, our sincerity, our spirituality were developed. I believe that in Europe there is an inaccurate understanding of many Russian traits. To be honest, I wanted to try to correct it.” For Georgy Shishkin, what is truly Russian is not so much daring and strong, sometimes reckless, but, in Yesenin’s way, “unspeakable and tender.” This is the credo of his “Russian Dreams”. “There is something strong in its meekness that passes through, seeps through, shines through in the frescoes of Andrei Rublev,” the artist believes. - Look into the eyes of his saints, his prophets and righteous people. It is immediately noticeable how much they differ from the images of Byzantine painting (the same Theophanes the Greek - the teacher of Andrei Rublev), which gave us the canons, forming the rules and guidelines of the first Russian painters. After all, these living Rublev frescoes echoed and are echoed in Russian artists of subsequent generations. This echo either died down or became louder, but never disappeared and will never disappear.”