Аркадий Ескин

 A real discovery for many visitors who are not familiarized with the art of Orenburg painters became Arkady Yeskin’s works. In this exhibition he appeared as an artist who is most free from external influence and possesses a world of his own. His landscapes and genre compositions attracted most exacting connoisseurs by the musicality of colour and rhythm, by sharp observation and that internal organic nature which is inherent to individuals with innate artistic talent. Among his large and small works there were no incidental ones which would drastically lower the general level. Each of them duly represented his art, confirming the master’s high colour and composition craftsmanship, be it “The morning’ (), “The white cow” (), “The spring outing” () or “The bathing” (). Each of these canvases is distinguished first of all with the poignancy of its emotional images, sustained by a precisely found colouristic key. Yeskin’s rustic motives represented at the exhibition in their sum build up a thoroughly realistic picture of the people’s life, about which the painter can tell in the language of his art, without any rhetoric or pomposity. In “The spring outing”, for instance, the subject action, developed in details, not only does not push painting as such to the background, as it often happens to some “picture-makers” of our days, but somehow is a bearing for plastic action. That is, an unseparable alloy of social and plastic elements arises. We witness coming true the dream so many times expounded in the articles of art GROUP EXHIBITION OF TEN ORENBURG ARTISTS HELD IN THE SUMMER OF 1986 IN THE HALLS OF THE CENTRAL HOUSE OF ARTIST ON THE CRIMEA EMBANKMENT IN MOSCOW critics, art manager and artists themselves — the dream of a “full value painting carrying a subject and theme”, which, in this specific case, looks not as the outcome of strained acts and compromise, but as something born freely and naturally according to art’s laws. At the same time you are won by the innate ethnicity of Yeskin’s art which does not have to stylize whatsoever. “The steppe’s life, its colours, its villages and people, their every day existence — all this excites me greatly,” — the artist writes in the catalogue, and we do believe him, because this excitement — and in a wider sense — this love for his native land is acknowledged in all his works. For an artist colouring is equal to the love for the subject he depicts. For some of Yeskin’s works one could find analogies and parallels in the works of past years and in modern searches of certain Soviet artists; but any voluntary or unvoluntary coincidences and associations would never discard the conclusion about the independent road that this Orenburg master follows. V.V , ar t cr i t i c