The author of the “Letters about Tashkent” channel, Evgeny Sklyarevsky, shares his impressions of visiting the artist’s workshop.
I was lucky: I visited Viktor Olegovich Apukhtin’s workshop with friends. For the first half hour, the camera shutters were just clicking, because we were speechless from the abundance of fabulous things: antique shoes, rusty scales, a ship's bell, a dinosaur bone, a postman's horn and an infinite number of other things. Plus books, albums, figurines, presses for making engravings. And the workshop itself is in a two-story house built in 1949 with a stove and rounded plywood ceilings. I remembered the name of the old TV show “Visiting a Fairy Tale,” and that’s exactly what it was.
Then Viktor Olegovich began to talk. About his parents, how they got to Uzbekistan, about the interesting people he had the opportunity to meet, work, study and teach. Of the big and famous names, I was most struck by my acquaintance with Orest Vereisky. Since childhood, I paid attention to his illustrations for books, I always recognized them and rejoiced as acquaintances. I especially remember the “Quiet Don” edition of the 50s with its drawings - it was from them, and not from the book or from the films, that I imagined the life of the village residents. And I certainly never expected that someone else would remember the artist of this book and that I would meet a person who knew him!
We heard a lot of unusual things, or rather, things we didn’t think about, but things that are important for everyone. For example, a conventional model of society, or more precisely, art, in which at the bottom there is folk art, dissolved in God, at the top there are priests preaching that God exists, and in the middle between them is a secular society seeking God. The division is conditional, of course, the layers diffuse and exchange ideas all the time, this model simply gives room for reasoning and understanding of certain processes. This is in my poor-language retelling, in fact everything is more beautiful and reliable.
By the way, during a meeting at his exhibition, V. Apukhtin said that the main goal of art and painting in particular is to approach the main question of Genesis: “Who are we!? Where are we from!? What is Our purpose!? How does the descent of the Spirit into the body occur!?”
I also remember that artists have three objects of study: man from the inside, man from the outside, and man as a particle of the world. Moreover, Viktor Olegovich presented all these revelations not as a lecturer to students, but by reasoning, inviting to conversation, developing each question or remark of the guests. An unexpected thought came up when talking about the relationship between the concrete and the abstract: it turns out that a person who is not prepared to perceive the language of fine art has the illusion that concrete painting is much more complex, since it requires the authenticity of every stroke, every little thing.
And we also heard about subtle and elegant matters, so tender and amazing that I don’t risk retelling them, because everything could be accidentally changed and shown in the wrong light, but I wouldn’t want to do that. I will only hint at two conclusions: we are all connected by something high, and “art” can also be used to heal, which, however, was pointed out by Aristotle. And there is no purpose in retelling the whole conversation, I just wanted to say that such an interesting artist lives next to us.
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