Spring, summer, fall, and winter change one another, as spectators climb up the art center’s spiral stairs. “Traveling” is a very suitable title for the exhibit of Leonid Zaborovsky, a Meritorious Painter of Ukraine. His picturesque images of Ukraine’s nooks in various seasons are additional proof of our motherland’s beauty.
Leonid Zaborovsky was born in the village of Oleksandrivka, Chernihiv oblast. He graduated from the Ushinsky State Pedagogical Institute of Odesa in 1992. The artworks he did in the 1990s were about his native land. He worked as painting teacher at a Chernihiv art school and then as curator of the contemporary art section of the Chernihiv Oblast Art Museum. Zaborovsky taught at an art school in Slavutych, Kyiv oblast, in 1996-2000.
Naturally, the artist’s geographical kinship with the locality s/he lives in plays a certain role in their choice of a color palette. For example, the Chernihiv region’s colors had a strong impact on Zaborovsky’s flamboyant canvasses. Although the artist works in several genres, landscapes are central to his oeuvre.
As the artist travels across “Ukraine’s multicolored regions” – from his native Chernihiv region to Crimea – you can see the sea, pine-trees, sunflower and haystack fields, snow-covered mountain tops, or a tiny hamlet that looks out from behind the hills. The exhibit displays the 1990s-2010s paintings, including a few still lifes, as well as the artist’s latest works: the landscapes In Sloboda Ukraine and Picturesque Sedniv, and the still lifes Nighttime Experiment and Hurzuf Roses.
What looks like a monochromic flashpoint among the riot of warm colors is the 1995 landscape Morning Snow. This work shows such a refined gradation of grayish, whitish, and auburn shades that it creates a true impression of snow-burdened tree branches, a misty haze, and a lonely figure that is vanishing into the winter cold.
Leonid Zaborovsky is a participant in many regional, national, and international exhibits, art clubs, and plein air sessions. His works are exhibited at the Chernihiv Oblast Art Museum, Nikolai Roerich house-cum-museum in Odesa, the art galleries N-Prospect (Saint Petersburg, Russia) and Tzimas (Athens, Greece), as well as kept in the private collections in Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Britain, the US, Canada, France, Slovakia, China, Armenia, and Turkey.
The exhibit will remain open until June 14.
