The world of the eternal truth is small but universal. It does not matter how different or unique, the fundamentals are incontestable. Like feelling the power of gravitation when one gets close to the gravitation field of the Earth, every one who ponders the question :Where am I from?” accepts the justified answer, “I am from my childhood.”
This aphoristic affirmation is the first heartfelt response by a person looking through this unusual Children’s album…even if only one time.
Childhood never disappears; it hides away in a secluded place of our “ego”, ceding to youth , maturity, and old age. It does not soon remind about itself. But as soon as one feels the taste of fish oil, or, the sudden smell of the well known fragrance of granny’s perfume from a miraculously preserved empty bottle of scent, then childhood will appear from its shelter. We stop during our trace, freeze and immerse into this moment, desperately trying to prolong it.
Lucky people are those who are able to avoid a severance of the thinnest thread connecting us with our childhood, and those who hear the miracle bell whose sounds remind, in an ever so fragile form, of yourself as you appear from the mysterious cloud of past memories.
Vyacheslav Gaivoronsky and Sergey Volkov were two men from among those lucky people when they created their charming album for their children. This musician and this painter opened a window for us to look upon our own cherished past world.
Flatness of the sheet can be a miraculous screen, a border between reality and memory. We, being mortal, watch the movies of our childhood alone, not being able to commemorate them into images by sounds or paints; but musicians and artists are able to share those images with us. In this case the artistic power will be defined by the power of resonance in our hearts, power of universality, recognizing oneself in another person.
The main character is a child, kid, baby…Who is it – a boy or a girl? Is this the author, as he sees himself in his childhood, or the finely noticed world of his daughter? Or son? The secret is that the main character is the personification of some mystic merging on both sceen and author’s own “inner” child, extracted from the secrecy of subconscious, awoken by fatherhood. This merging is absolute, because had the childhood never been revived by children granted by destiny, then it would never become possible: this deep immense portrayal into one’s own heart, into those remote times, when “ trees were high”…
In the creative cooperation of artist and musician each has his own role. The worlds of visible and audible images exist side by side, enriching each other but using its own individual language. It is important for artist to show not the course of events, but to immerse into that fairylike world of the charming discoverers each of us were in the childhood country left long ago. In the compositions he tries to express that special condition of discovering the world when a undimmed child’s heart just started discovering it. At that time when the whole universe can be in one’s play-yard, when a kid meets a butterfly or a star, flower or snow- all seeming mysterious, full of special meaning.
This is DIFFERENT space from where the laws which are common for us adults do not yet work. Spontaneity of apprehension in a child’s soul which will disappear completely later in life is the leitmotif of the series by Sergey Volkov. He has designed this world carefully, calling us as if an unexpected guest, trying not to frighten reanimated apparition which can disappear from the slightest rustle.
The meaning of this is most clearly seen in “Dream” and “ Cartoons”. Its character exists in the connecting space full of metaphorical objects of his children’s fantasies which arc arising somewhere in the depth of unconscious… to be drawn into a dream vortex. This exact method of showing the inside through the outside is the core connecting the graphic sheets of the Children’s Album.
Even if there are no fantasies but instead, the reality of the world of common things in the foreground, the principle of “inside through the outside” remains.
“Grandfather Came!” – the scene seems to be seen in two dimensions at once from outside and from inside ( with the eyes of the child on the swing); one frozen moment shows a slightly deformed foreshortened world and the joyful feeling of a holiday, when whole life can pass till the evening.
The method of slight deformation of usual things helps to inspire them to breathe a special life-like characteristic of children’s imagination into them. This way the grand piano becomes alive in the “ First opus”. It looks like a kind hippopotamus, a full-blooded co- author of the young pianist, because it produces sounds and those sounds mix with the sun light and cloud the space of the room like a veil.
If objects can be inspired what can be said about animals inhabiting the world of childhood? “Kitten” is the closest and most approachable for contact with a little person. It gets into the “frame”
of a sheet more often than anything else: it is almost tiger (“Kitten Poosh”), or mystic magic attribute of night (“Lullaby”), friend who
understand everything (“Cartoons”) or a fairytale character “cat- scholar” (“Grandfather came!”). There are exotic animals from circus in childhood leading their own fantastic life- “Waltz” represents an episode of the enchanting spectacle from the life of an elephant-artist.
Center of gravitation of a child’s soul, hub of his world, personification of his life, at last, is the child’s mother. What warmth and peacefulness radiates from his sheet in “Mother”! Softness in the silhouette of her figure, in the folds of her dress…comfort and calmness are felt in her whole appearance. In truth in childhood “ my mother is the most beautiful”… this is how a child could see his mother through half closed eyelashes… a moment before sinking into a sweet and careless sleep, which is possible only in childhood.
Looking through the album again it comes to the mind that in general we are dealing with the REFLECTION of apprehension of a child’s soul where the artist has got a pass, by nature of his talent.
He suggests where to look for the key to the understanding of the depicted sheet in – “Father” – self-portrait of the artist. On the surface of the vase there is a reflection of him and the window through which the world of childhood has been opened for us.
The artist has a complete command of intellect and a self- determined way of expressing the meaning. Composer, ruling in the world of sounds, appeals to finer spheres of apprehension. For those who penetrate into his musical images which arc reflecting times of childhood, are to feel the finest esthetic pleasure. Each piece is like a complete and perfect jewel in the necklace of the musical cycle. As well as the artist choosing the necessary colors on palette, the Composer builds up rhythm of lines, using available methods of organizing sounds in a field that creates unique musical images identical to their preset topic.
“Children’s Album” by Gayvoronsky and Volkov shows to us a wonderful union of two eternal arts, born by the talent and skillfulness of its creators.
By GALINA CARGANOVA, art-critic, writer.
(Translated by Anna Emets and the publisher).