Suite By Sergei Rachmaninoff (2020) Drawing by Nikolai Sednin (Nicolas Sednin)

"Portrait with prologue and epilogue”.
In recent years, it has become fashionable for the heads of major Moscow Universities to buy paintings from me. Often these are custom copies of my large-format photo collages from the cycles of the mid-2000s with an abundance of aesthetics of the naked body, which is unspeakably surprised, but always sincerely happy, because I consider this fact the presence of signs of good taste. Occasionally there are orders for portraits.
In early March 2020, I received an order for a large portrait of the composer Rachmaninoff and several photos were sent to me. The client insisted that the portrait must also depict the composer's hands. Unfortunately, Rachmaninoff's hands looked like melted wax in all the photos he sent - limp and expressionless. Perhaps the photographer did a bad job, or for a pianist, such relaxation of the hands and fingers is a normal phenomenon, but for me as an artist, drawing such hands is an extremely thankless task. I asked for additional photos and was completely delighted when I saw a photo of the composer at the piano in profile and with a cigarette in his mouth, inserted in the fashion of his century in an elegant mouthpiece. Since that moment Sergey Vasilyevich and I have established a friendly contact since we both turned out to be heavy smokers!
As it happens, Smoking tobacco for me is often associated with thinking about new compositions and fixing ideas on paper. It is at such moments that I come up with new images. I imagined that He did this in his time, which means that the process of Smoking and writing new music was a single whole. Hence the idea to make a black-and-white portrait on sheet music surrounded by arabesques of smoke rings, which invariably tend to the form of violin keys. It took a long time to find the right notes for the portrait. I chose a recognizable piece of music and simultaneously searched for notes printed on yellowish paper, as if the composer had already smoked it. The choice fell on the sheet music edition of the d-moll Suite with simultaneous reprint reproduction of the original author's notes of the composer. Nine pages of sheet music formed the basis of the collage, and the rest were hidden away for future reference, because there was no doubt that I would have the desire and reason to return to the implementation of my idea.
By the way, I never considered Smoking a cause for pride, but I am sure that the great Russian composer would support me in saying that in this portrait we are not talking about a bad habit, but about music that arises even from tobacco smoke when you are obsessed with art.

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Nikolai SedninНиколай СеднинМузей Николая Седнина