Andrey Soldatenko

Member of Artists Union of Russia, Member of International Association of Art. Included in the bibliographic catalog "Artists of Saratov and Saratov region" (published by decision of the Academic Council of the Saratov State Art Museum named after Radishchev). Andrey Soldatenko was born 27 July, 1975. Andrey graduated Saratov Art College named after Bogolubov in 1995. Studying design at the College Andrey was more interested in painting, especially landscape painting. Every summer, he used to travel to picturesque places on the River Volga for artistic inspiration. The studies painted during those trips found their way into local art exhibitions. The first exhibition was organized by a group of young artists in the autumn of 1993. Its success was very inspiring and after that exhibitions became regular. Around the same time Andrey’s personal exhibitions took place where his paintings and drawings were exhibited. In his early works the artist focused more on representing the fleeting emotions connected with observing the different states of nature or town streets. Along with painting, Andrey produces decorative and abstract works.
In the autumn of 1996, in Saratov Exhibition Hall of the Union of Artists a large exhibition of the works of Saratov artists took place where Andrey Soldatenko presented a series of his works. The exhibition was very successful and attracted a lot of public attention. Responses were quite various – from very positive to critical. This exhibition is still remembered in Saratov now, after all these years.
From 1997 to 2008, Andrey Soldatenkov took part in several exhibitions:
1997, the Regional Exhibition, Saratov;
2002, the exhibition at the 4th Festival of Slavic Culture, Paris. Awarded a diploma of the Russian Centre of International Scientific and Cultural Cooperation of the Russian Government.
2003, the personal exhibition “Beach” in the museum of Pavel Kuznetsov (Saratov State Art Museum named after Radishchev);
2006, the Regional Exhibition of Young Artists, Saratov;
2007, the National Exhibition of Young Artists, Moscow;
2007, the Regional Exhibition, Saratov;
2008, the National Exhibition “Victory”, Volgograd;
2008, the Regional Exhibition, Saratov;
2008, the Regional Exhibition “The Youth of Russia”, Saratov. Awarded a diploma of the Russian Academy of Arts.
2008, the Volga Regional Exhibition “The Big Volga”, Cheboksary.
2009, Exhibition in the Gallery “InDIVA”, Varna.
2009, the National Exhibition "Russia-XI", СHA, Moscow.
2009, the Bulgarian and Russian Exhibition "Prism". Varna, Ruse, Pazargik, Burgas, Sofia. Bulgaria.
2009, Russian Art Week, Moscow
2010, National Exhibition, Central House of Artists, Moscow
2010 Interregional Exhibition - Volga young
2010 National Exhibition of Young Artists (Central House of Artists, Moscow)

In his present day works, Andrey sets himself new, more sophisticated objectives – to create images ideal for the perception of viewers, to find the right balance of colours and objects, to find the harmony in lines, in other words, to transfigure the nature in order to represent the feelings and emotions inspired by the natural objects without revealing the artist’s effort.
As a contemporary artist, Soldatenko is not hostage to a single style. He masterfully uses different directions as tools for creating artistic images. Soldatenko working on realistic landscapes and still lifes ( "Country House. Bulgaria", "Memories of Summer"), paintings in the Impressionist manner ( "Alley"), decorative compositions (triptych "Watering"), abstract compositions ( "Flowers"), symbolic works ( "Landscape with a lake"). A number of works in the style of Sots Art ( "U.S.", "Sheep. Alarm").
Andrey Soldatenko’s works can be found in private collections in Russia, France, Germany, the USA, and other countries.

2002, the exhibition at the 4th Festival of Slavic Culture, Paris. Awarded a diploma of the Russian Centre of International Scientific and Cultural Cooperation of the Russian Government.
2008, the Regional Exhibition “The Youth of Russia”, Saratov. Awarded a diploma of the Russian Academy of Arts.
2009 Placed in the encyclopedia "Who is Who in Russia." Published by Verlag für Personenenzyklopädien AG (Switzerland)

From 1997 Andrey Soldatenkov took part in several exhibitions:
1997, the Regional Exhibition, Saratov;
2002, the exhibition at the 4th Festival of Slavic Culture, Paris. Awarded a diploma of the Russian Centre of International Scientific and Cultural Cooperation of the Russian Government.
2003, the personal exhibition “Beach” in the museum of Pavel Kuznetsov (Radischev State Art Gallery in Saratov);
2006, the Regional Exhibition of Young Artists, Saratov;
2007, the National Exhibition of Young Artists, Moscow;
2007, the Regional Exhibition, Saratov;
2008, the National Exhibition “Victory”, Volgograd;
2008, the Regional Exhibition, Saratov;
2008, the Regional Exhibition “The Youth of Russia”, Saratov. Awarded a diploma of the Russian Academy of Arts.
2008, the Volga Regional Exhibition “The Big Volga”, Cheboksary.
2009, Exhibition in the Gallery “InDIVA”, Varna.
2009, the National Exhibition "Russia-XI", СHA, Moscow.
2009, the Bulgarian and Russian Exhibition "Prism". Varna, Ruse, Pazargik, Burgas, Sofia. Bulgaria.
2010 International Exhibition of Russian Art Week, Moscow

Oil painting, especially in the first pair, a complex process. But after some obvious things are still clear, oil painting is much more pleasant. In this technique work is very interesting. The process of search and experimentation never stops. Ways of working in this technique a lot. And feel the freedom when their master.

Techniques for the different processes of oil painting

When the artwork painter should have as a goal: to fulfill his plan most sophisticated technical means.
Materials used in oil painting, composition and properties are very complex and varied, so the most effective and proper use artist must have known of knowledge and follow a certain system in the construction of the paint layer.

There are many different systems of painting, but the most common of them, especially after prolonged use, this multi-layered.

In a multilayer system of the whole process works is divided into separate major phases, performed in more or less definite sequence: 1) shading the soil, 2) design, 3) application of the basic colors, 4) parts, 5) glaze; 6) completion.

Toning soil

The color of soil is of great importance, because of it depends largely on the effect of color pictures. A beam of light passing through layers of transparent colors and falling to the ground stained, partly absorbed, partly reflected and come to the surface of the picture painted in a color, depending on the color of the soil and transparent paints.
Rembrandt preferred primer-colored slate, Rubens - a red-brown and umbristy, Matveev - brown soil, podmalevyvaya his grisaille, Levitsky - neutral-green color of soil, Borovikovsky enjoyed neutral gray primer applied Bryullov light brown, Alexander Ivanov tinted primer light ocher, Repin wrote on the white ground, Surikov also enjoyed the white bottoms, performing drawing in cold tones.

Drawing figure

Preparing a drawing or separately on paper and then translating to canvas, or directly on the canvas.

Applying basic colors

Underpainting as a general outline is the first layer of paint in the painting, which aims to establish a pattern, the overall color and thus facilitate and create training for further propisok.
Underpainting write a thin layer, as in the light, and in the shadows skorosohnuschimi paints, varnishes and diluting them with solvents to the dry could continue to work in a few days.
Multi-layered method of painting based on the principle of optical mixture of colors gives you a wide variety of colors and shades of colors, protects against the harmful effects of colors on each other, what happens when the usual method of mixing them, and facilitates the technique work on the creation of highly artistic works of art, as well as provides long-term preservation of paintings.
Application scumbling refers to very remote times. Oil paints and varnishes are great possibilities of using this technique in easel painting.

Step scumbling due to the fact that the underlying solid paint reflects the rays are attached to the rays of transparent paint.

If the red cadmium prolessirovat kraplakom, we get the impression of intense pure and deep tones.

STAINING, passing through a light, absorbs additional colors. For example, kraplak absorbs green rays, Prussian blue - red-yellow, on the surface, thus, goes part of the colored rays, without any admixture of white.

When laying consistently the dark podmalevku additional glaze colors such as burnt Sienna and ultramarine, a thorough dark tone.

Painting is a work of art by painting (oil, tempera, watercolors, gouache, etc.) deposited on any solid surface. The main thing in painting - color, its ability to induce various feelings, associations, strengthens the emotional images.
By the nature of color combinations, it can be warm and cold, happy and sad, calm and intense, light and dark.
Painting is capable of delivering on the plane and the volume of space, nature, reveal a complex world of human emotions and characters embody universal ideas, events of the past, mythological images, and imagination.
Painting is divided into the easel and monumental. Artist paints pictures on canvas, stretched on a frame and mounted on an easel, which can also be called a machine. Hence the name "easel painting".

And the word "monumental" shows something big and significant. The monumental painting - more pictures on the internal or external walls of buildings (murals, panels, etc.).
Interest in artists of different objects and events of the world led to the emergence over the XVII-XX centuries. genres of painting: portraiture, still life, landscape, the animal, domestic (genre), the mythological, historical, battle genre. In works of art can meet the combination of genres, or their elements. For example, a still life or landscape can successfully complement the portrait.
For technical methods and materials used painting can be divided into the following types: oil, tempera, wax (encaustic), enamel, glue, water paints on wet plaster (fresco), etc. In some cases it is difficult to separate art from graphic arts. The works executed in watercolor, gouache, pastels, may apply to painting, and graphics.
Painting can be a single-layer, performed, and multilayered, comprising podmalevki and glaze, applied to the dried paint layer of transparent and translucent layers of paint. This is achieved by subtle nuances and shades of color.
Important means of artistic expression in the paintings are slick and the nature of stroke, texture, Valerie (show subtle changes in tone depending on the illumination), reflections, appearing on the interaction of lying next to flowers.
Construction of volume and space in painting is associated with linear and aerial perspective, the spatial properties of warm and cool colors, cut-off modeling form, sending the overall color tone fabric. To create a pattern, except for color, needed a good figure and expressive composition. The artist usually begins work on canvas with a search for the most successful solutions in sketches. Then, in the many scenic sketches from nature, he is preparing the necessary elements of the composition. Work on the painting can begin with the implementation of the picture composition with a brush, podmalevka and directly writing canvases by various pictorial means. Moreover, even the preliminary sketches and studies often have an independent artistic value, especially if you belong to the brush-known painter.
In ancient times, has become urgent quest for light and shade.
Medieval art was mostly religious content. It featured a loud expression, mostly of local color, expressive contours. A significant role was played by symbolism of color.
In the Renaissance sense of harmony of the universe, anthropocentrism. Artists first came to write his paintings on the outdoors.
At the end of XIX-XX centuries. development of painting becomes particularly complex and controversial. Various realistic, and modernistic currents are winning the right to exist.
Appears abstract painting (see avant-garde, abstract art, underground), which marked the abandonment of fine and active expression of the artist's personal relationship to the world, emotionality and conventional color, exaggeration and geometrization of forms, decorative and associativity of composite solutions.
In the XX century. the search for new colors and technical means to create paintings, which will undoubtedly lead to the emergence of new styles in painting, but the oil painting is still one of the most popular techniques.
Form various scenic system: dynamic Baroque painting with its distinctive closed, spiral-shaped track; rococo painting with a game of exquisite shades of color, light colors, painting classicism with a clear, strict and clear picture.
In the XIX century. Art has played an active role in public life. Painting Romanticism differed active interest in the dramatic events of history and modernity, contrasting light and shade, color saturation.

In modern works, I set myself the goal - to create an ideal vision for the picture, find the right balance of color patches, depicted objects, to find harmony in line, plastic, to transform nature so as to convey a sense of its condition, and at the same time that all the work done (kitchen) was not visible to the viewer.
I am not a hostage to a single style. For me, different directions are just tools for creating artistic images. I'm working on realistic landscapes and still life ("Country House. Bulgaria", "Memories of Summer"), paintings in the impressionist style ("The Alley"), decorative compositions (triptych "Watering"), abstract and analiticheskimii songs ("Flowers") , symbolic works ("Landscape with a lake"). Some consider me to be a successor of the ideas of Cubism. But when I sodaval "city streets" and the like, I do not think of cubism and its development in the modern world. I was guided by what writers called "artistic truth" when the characters in the book begin to behave not as conceived writer. We artists are the same. While working on the art works, I often have to change the original idea, because it requires a "representational truth." In my avant-garde compositions as if I make out the world into its constituent parts and from them as a mosaic put together a again. Although the house still houses, and trees, the trees, the world looks a little different. This approach makes it possible to focus on different parts, look at the world through different eyes, sometimes not even human.
I also really love to draw most beautiful nature spots. But the more I like to find and display the symbolic overtones of the natural phenomena and people's lives. And some critics call my work a symbolic realism. One way or another possession different styles gives a lot of freedom in creativity. It's like training with worsening. To achieve perfection must work hard and carefully look around. Here is my philosophy.

2007 Catalogue of the All-Russian Art Exhibition of Young Artists of Russia "
2008 Catalogue of interregional art exhibition "Youth of Russia"
2008 Catalogue of the All-Russian art exhibition dedicated to the victory of Soviet forces in the Battle of Stalingrad
2008 Catalog Anniversary Regional Art Exhibition "Big Volga"
2009 catalog of the exhibition of artists of the Volga region "Big Volga in Moscow"

Avant-gardism called experimental, modernist beginnings in art. In every era there were innovative phenomenon in the visual arts, but the term "avant-garde" has established itself only in the beginning of XX century.
In all the avant-garde directions, despite their great diversity, one can identify common features: the rejection of the norms of classical images, formal innovation, deformation forms, expression and different gaming transformation. All this leads to a blurring of the boundaries between art and reality (ready-mepd, installation, envayroment), creating an ideal open-art direct invasion into the environment.
Works by avant-garde directions sometimes lose their fine start and are equal to the objects of reality. Modern trends in avant-garde are closely intertwined, forming a new form of synthetic art

From 19 to 25 April in the exhibition hall of the Moscow Union of Artists of Moscow House of Artists "(address: ul.Kuznetsky Bridge, 11) will host the International Exhibition of Modern Art" RUSSIAN ART WEEK ", 24 April at 18.00 will be auctioned. Artist Andrey Soldatenko present at the exhibition-competition of two works: "All life is the game. Celebration in Zherovnitsa" and "Dollar or the philosophy of the crowd in pursuit of profit."
"The whole life of the game. Celebration in Zherovnitse". In Bulgaria there is still a tradition to arrange holidays in national costumes. And young and old trying to dress as their ancestors dressed. "Back to the past" and live the life which can live ancestors, recreating life, relationships and so on. It's part of life, and at the same time - this is just a game. But the game, which carries only the creative source and a lot of positives.
"The dollar, or philosophy of the crowd in pursuit of profit." On the one hand, it is pretty lyrical picture. The other. Sheep along the road strictly as a dollar sign. Story of sheep can be considered as turn (in real life it was a "turn" to drink). And finally, this is also the social metaphor. Life is very different looks depending on the point of view. This work is not of the discharge of conventional provocation. It shows how unpredictable events are symbolic in the real nature which surrounds us. Baran, who looks at us, can also be viewed as a metaphor: only one person in a hundred can not be like the other "sheep".

Y. I., Vodonos, Art Expert, Member of the Artists’ Union, Head of the Russian Art section of Radishchev Art Gallery, Saratov.

Andrey Soldatenko is an unusually prolific artist who has entered his “early maturity” stage. He is in the perpetual process of search. At the early days of his artistic career, the Artist was greatly influenced by the lyrical heartfelt paintings by Yevgeniy Dmitriyevich Yali, a Saratov landscape artist, as well as socialising with the young artist of his age – Vladimir Korin and Yuri Umanets. The sprit of special “immersion” and unhurried, slightly detached contemplation inherent to this master and his talented followers is intrinsic to Soldatenko to a known extent. He is rooted in this tradition. However, the dominating component of his style was formed only within recent years, and it is substantially different from those masters, because it is dictated, first of all, by his personal vision of this world.
In the latest decade, the talented artist Ruslan Lavrinin’ko who stands out from the group of the senior generation of Saratov landscape artists became Andrey’s constant advisor and teacher. His personal example played significant role in the young Artist’s self-identification as a person and as an artist, cultivating responsibility for his outstanding talent.
A. Soldatenko became a free-lance artist in difficult times, at times when the art market was shaping out slowly and with difficulties, when the art criteria were easily compromised in pursue of commercial success. Survival criteria and criteria for the personal talent’s survival were mutually excluding. The demands of the market are no better than the requirements of the exhibition committees of the totalitarian era. They differ in their quality, but they are not less harmful in their seducing power for the talent who certainly needs support, but the kind of support which does not involve thematic and stylistic dictatorship.
The Artist had to find his special place in the multicoloured picture of the modern art. His emotional and aesthetic experiences grow from year to year. Perfecting the drawing and taking special care of the colour, it elevated to a higher level; we can hope that in the conditions of the expected post-crisis agitation he will be able to withstand the pressure without distracting himself with commercial projects. Andrey Soldatenko’s best pictures and studies are emotionally convincing and attract not by the superficial beauty of the scenery, but by the achieved harmony, the unity of the colour and graphic solutions. Most often, this is a lyrical generalization of the most common, not specially sought for motives of the Volga landscape. The Artist is most successful in depicting the poetry of the grey days, with their characteristic restrained colours and its special flow of colour over the canvas, making the canvas surface itself nearly the main element of the composition.
Many of elements similar to other Saratov landscape artists are imposed by the similarity of the nature motives: like some of the artists of the past, on many occasions Andrey was painting in Bannovka nighbourhood. Bannovka is a village to the South from Saratov, situated not so far from Shcherbakovka, the place famous among local artists of 1920 -1930, where Yakov Weber, a talented and experienced landscape artist permanently lived. There, in summer months artists were spending their vacation days, many of the young Saratov artists of that time were hinting and fishing there. Similarity of motives imposes certain similarity of graphic solutions.
The best of Soldatenko’s artworks are those where the feeling of a certain place of the Volga’s nature is presented being already partially transformed by his personal vision, and this has a special meaning. When O. Sidlin, St Petersburg artist and professor was asked:”How to paint – from nature or by using your imagination?” He sparked immediately: “Imagine from the nature!” Of course, he was talking about imagining not for the sake of satisfying an undemanding taste, but about freedom of the artistic imagination which transforms the visual reality of the chosen object. The most recent exhibition in Saratov demonstrated that Soldatenko follows this footpath.
Until recently, I was unaware of another dimension of Soldatenko’s art: he is the author of a number of “city fantasy” graphic works and paintings tinted with impressions from the paintings of foreign and national artists with clear features of the avant-garde search of 1920-s, he also has some purely decorative drawings and paintings.
Quite likely, this is the manifestation of the Artist’s designer education – More that other artists, he shows more explicit interest in morphogenesis, revealing the structural source of the depicted objects, colour compatibility of conditionally coloured surfaces, peculiarities of graphic rhythms and deliberate harmonization of chaotic. Nearly incompatible things co-exist in Soldatenko’s art – quite obtrusive pictorialism and nearly abstract paintings. At this stage, these tendencies exist separate from one another; they develop nearly in parallel and hardly overlap. It is hard to say which tendency will take the upper hand in his future artworks.
Over the last few years, Andrey Soldatenko gradually resolves the problem of splitting his efforts between the two burdens: to provide for his family and finance his true art projects by working on commercial paintings. The Artist’s name becomes known outside of the small circle of aesthetically enlightened collectors. The growing recognition and demand for his true art paintings gives the Artist a chance to pay undisturbed attention to real art, the works of sterling merit. This circumstance significantly stimulates his growth as an artist and makes his feeling of responsibility for his artworks yet stronger.