‘I never try to please anyone’

‘I never try to please anyone’: 5 creative principles of Leonid Maadyr-ool

Real art cannot belong to the people.

Leonid Maadyr-ool

The first principle

I see no point in painting for the sake of painting, creating beautiful candy wrappers. I live every my picture. It’s important for an artist to combine academicism and the laws of creativity with the ideas that are born in his head.

The main thing in art Maadyr-ool considers not a beautiful picture in itself, but a concept, idea, content (explicit or hidden). And even if this content carries the message of reproach, as in the picture “Old House on Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street in Belaya Tserkov” (the second name is “Burned House”) - it will be more valuable than some ideal landscape. The house depicted on the canvas was built over a hundred years ago. And in the 1990s it was burned. The artist united the day and night in the picture. Half of the house is depicted in the majestic tranquility of the experienced witness of a large segment of history. This is the day. The other half is engulfed in a destructive flame. The night is around. The contrast is designed to emphasize the importance of preserving the past.

Leonid Maadyr-ool. “Burned House”

However, in the content of some of Maadyr-ool’s paintings there can be irony. “Will it be Raining? (Girls with hoes)” is called the canvas, which depicts people walking in the center of the city with garden tools and “kravchuchkas” (a playful name (mainly in Ukraine) of a kind of hand truck for the carriage of goods, which is a folding L-shaped frame with two wheels on which a bag or box is put - transl.) and anxiously looking at the sky. At first glance, it is not clear why these people, beautiful young women and men in hats, walk around the city with tools for growing their vegetable gardens. But the time of painting - 1995 - serves as a hint. It was then that the Ukrainians began to massively receive the summer land plots. And the questions “Will it be raining?”, “Should I go to the dacha (the vegetable garden in the suburb – transl.)?” seemed to hang right in the air.

Leonid Maadyr-ool. "Girls with hoes".

The second principle

Often the idea, the image of the future picture comes to me in a dream. Then I look at the people who surround me. The impression of the injustice of the world around us, of the state policy is added to this. And then I think, how can all this be aligned in the picture, how to combine injustice, kindness and those images and forms that came in a dream? When I manage to combine it all, it turns out something that not everyone can get, but the main thing is that I get it. Lenin said that art belongs to the people. It’s not true. Art belongs to those who understand it. I never try to please the people. My task is to make a picture such that not everyone likes it. Real art is a thing intended to be understood by the intellectuals. If the artist focuses on an intellectual audience, he raises his level. If everyone likes you, then you are an amateur.

The desire not to be a thing, which everyone will like, is a kind of provocation, a conscious decision not to be a commercial artist, massively producing “glossy” paintings. But thanks to this provocation, Leonid Maadyr-ool manages to create canvases with a deep meaning, much deeper than the one that seems clear at first glance at the picture. In his work “Mirage on Hetmanskaya” (the second name is “Three-tiered Church and Modernity”), the past is intertwined with the present. On the canvas one can see one of the most recognizable places of Belaya Tserkov, the house of Taubin, built at the end of the 19th century. It is well preserved and has become an integral part of the urban landscape, with hundreds and thousands of city residents passing by it every day. In the picture, the house of Taubin appears in its modern form, with a city trolleybus passing by. However, an old wooden church is depicted nearby, and near it is the noisy chaos of the market. There is no church, no market in that street, or even in that area. But they were there in the 18th century. The artist accidentally found out about it when he was interested in the history of the city. He offers us to become interesting in it too. Maadyr-ool is not an artist for a lazy viewer.

Leonid Maadyr-ool. “Three-tiered Church and Modernity”

He likes to make modernity be friends with the past. Sometimes the present even says “Hello” to the past. That is the name of the painting also dedicated to the history of the Belaya Tserkov and to people living in this city. This canvas is a small but informative story about how a girl came to the exhibition and saw a boy in the picture depicting an old town. It was the boy who could possibly have become her lover if they lived at the same time. Or perhaps this is her grandfather, when he was still quite young... The girl’s figure seems both static and going straight into the picture, as if wanting to plunge into that reality and find out how the city and its people lived decades ago.

Leonid Maadyr-ool. “Hello”.

The third principle

I am the biggest critic for myself. I often look at my picture and think ‘Bad, bad, bad...’ and keep thinking until I can make it better. As an artist, I am responsible for each stroke. But the further, the less I don’t like what I do. The point is probably both in experience and in that before I sit down to paint a picture, I am carrying it for a very long time in my head and even at the design stage I sharpen everything to a state that will satisfy me. Some of my artist friends make fun of me, saying that Maadyr can paint a picture in one night. Of course I can, if before that I lived with it for a month. There are no difficulties with the technique of painting, the main thing is the idea.

Finding the right path, a creative solution that allows you to put all your plans on the canvas is the most difficult task for the artist. The painting “Matsyuk. The City” is a collage that unites the most recognizable places of Belaya Tserkov. It seems that Leonid Maadyr-ool gathered all the city’s zests on one square meter and created the most concentrated portrait of the city. But the artist would not be himself if he had not made this portrait alive, emotional and forcing everyone who lives or lived in Belaya Tserkov to smile nostalgically. In the center of the composition is an old man with a smooth beard leading a bicycle in his hands; a trolley loaded to the top with mowed grass is attached to the bicycle. This character, Vitaly Gavrilovich Matsyuk, was known by the whole city both because he was a famous artist and because every day he used to ride his old bicycle to cut grass for his rabbits and a goat (it was once sold to him as a nanny-goat). This is how the Belaya Tserkov residents remembered Vitaly Matsyuk, always with a sketchbook and scythe, since he painted his paintings directly in the field. All the familiar artists kindly laughed at him because all the rabbits of Matsyuk were dying from old age; he could not kill them. The townspeople perceived the old Matsyuk as a living urban legend.

Leonid Maadyr-ool. “Matsyuk. The City”

Even a pine tree that grew in Vitaly Gavrilovich’s yard on Pushkinskaya Street, which is also one of the symbols of the Belaya Tserkov, got on the Maadyr-oll’s picture. And the usual life of the old city unfolds around the old artist: the viewer can look into the window and see the kissing lovers, the linen drying in the yard, cats walking on the roofs...

The fourth principle

People often ask me why I use mostly dark colors. However, there are no dark or light shades; there is an expression of emotions. A picture painted with the darkest colors can have a very bright meaning. And you can paint a terrible tragedy with the lightest colors. But I love saturated colors.

To understand how dark colors can depict absolute happiness and tranquility, just look at the picture “Motherhood” (the second name is “Madonna”). Painted in shades of brown, it conveys the most important thing that keeps the world - motherly love. The picture brings associations with the image of the Madonna with the baby.

Leonid Maadyr-ool. “Madonna”

The fifth principle

The healthy competition is important for the artist. Only then the progress is possible. There should be no envy, slander behind your back as this is the path to creative degradation.

To snatch a moment, to make the picture speak about the time when it was written, this is precisely the highlight that makes the work of Leonid Maadyr-ool truly special. The painting “Youth near BDDS” (Belaya Tserkov District Department Store – transl.) was painted during the 2004 Orange Revolution. It contains a fragment from the life of Belaya Tserkov during those rebellious events. It’s a meeting near the City Hall: loud speeches, flags. And next to it, near the BDDS, on the alley, where the informal youth gathers, is a different life in which politics plays a not so important role.

Leonid Maadyr-ool. “Youth near BDDS".