Аркадий Ескин

 beyond society, holding a place equal to Nature, that is why he is so fond of doing nudes . Yeskin depicts women in bath, by the river, washing floors or basking in bed… Absolutely uninvented situations, living bits of village life, some lightheartedness of summer existence with a tinge of generous humour. His women can be jovial, scared, touching, funny, passionate, somewhat sad and a little drunk. Paradoxically the images balance on the brink of every day triviality and symbolism, ridicule and grandeur, naivety and philosophical wisdom, flippancy and objective integrity. He sometimes displays impertinence and just turns a personage or even all of them with their backs to the onlooker. Such a solution, in fact, ostentatious, looks quite natural and organic, when he chooses doing so. And the whole scene does not lose the portray sense, on the contrary, turns out to gain greater volume in its charac- teristic feature. These backs are so expressive that when looking at them you could tell the life story of each. The bathhouse’s clean white wall, the bleached sky, clean buxom women sitting at the table covered with a white cloth, helping themselves to some vodka. When looking at this painting would you really feel like destroying sanctimoniously this harmony and accord?! They, so clean and chaste after taking their bath, feeling so good that they would sing a soul-filled song or indulge in women’s heartfelt sadness. And the artist tries to impart to the onlook- ers this “impression” of cleansing from all the bustle, all the perfunctory, false things. The yearning for love is with all the female personages of the artist. Each has the right for a feeling regardless of their age and beauty. It is the spectators who assess qualitatively the physique; there are such onlookers who just make a wry face and shrug their shoulders, and on a river bank his personages wearing their clumsy swimsuits just wave their hands inviting them to share the scorching sun, the clean water, simple serene life. With all the physique flaws female bodies and faces retain for the artist that inexpressible charm, tenderness and simplicity which they do have in reality. Lately Arkady Yeskin has been turning more and more often to self-portrait, looking more intently into his own image. Why? Has he accu- mulated questions to himself? Has time come to sum up? Yeskin’s answer is: “I just wanted to”. His prompt brush responds with such ruthless- ness to the dialogue with himself, that one feels ill at ease. We see a village Kumak fellow, with a broad nose, curved downward mouth line, with a tousled grey beard, T-shirt with a stretched collar, with a vangoghian straw hat on… But the image is charged with such energy and in- ner force, with such “unbosoming” intonation, that the personality scale increases many times. A very poignant look makes this image dramatic, does not let the spectator go. These feelings are enhanced by light. The face is either shaded or intensely lit. A hot range of red and brown hues with contrasting black blots, tempera- mental dab — all this serves to express feeling, an impulse going out from inside engenders a chain of complex senses. We can presume, that his statements as to his personality are not at all final summing up. We confront a hard, open in time, moment in the artist’s biography, which required a stopover, some speculation in order to gain forces for further movement. Nobody as much as “Irisha made an artist of me”, gave force and self-confidence, shook and raised me. She is herself a bright creative per- sonality, a painter in applied decorative arts, but still she put in the foremost place her husband’s creative work, care for him and the children. It was the union of two like-minded persons under- standing and forgiving each other. The relations in the family were absolutely comfortable for