Russia (bbabo.net), - Aleksey Gritsai, People's Artist and teacher of Surikovka, had a principle - do not waste time on a student if he does not have real abilities. He began to study with his son Sasha when he was three years old. Alexander Gritsay grew into an outstanding master - but it happened: his father outlived his son by 10 years...

The exhibition of Alexander Gritsai opened in the halls of the Union of Artists on Pokrovka.

While still a student of Surikov, he went to the Vologda and Arkhangelsk regions and forever became attached to these parts with his soul. In the 1970s, many writers and artists traveled to the northern villages, escaping from the noise of big cities and drawing inspiration there. They still managed to catch the outgoing nature - deserted villages, the destruction of the age-old way of life. And Alexander Gritsai was among those who were in a hurry to capture what they saw.

“We had a simple life: they carried water from a well, washed it in a river, heated a stove,” recalls Alla Arkadyevna, Gritsaya’s widow. - And in the morning, after breakfast, Sasha got into an old "gas truck" and drove to places of interest to him. And everything was interesting for him - forests, glades, outskirts, working people ...

So he set up a sketchbook: a woman is reaping wheat, gathering it in piles, with which the field is already covered (“Dozhinki”). Around the ears interspersed with grass, behind the back of the reaper is a village, in the hands of a sickle - everything, like a hundred, and two hundred years ago.

"Malye Gary Farm": it seems that behind the rickety fence is the same field, but gray houses are visible somewhere, cows are being led to them. But the “Night Shift” in the barn, you won’t get bored here: two bulls are about to grapple with their horns, and the cows that the women are trying to separate will roar deafeningly - and it’s hard to imagine the atmosphere in which the artist worked here, who never painted what he didn’t saw with my own eyes.

In the paintings there are stacks blackened from autumn rains, strings of low fences, silhouettes of jackdaws on a whorl, a simple device for a cart, a crane-well, a baby’s unsteadiness in the corner, a calf burying its muzzle in fragrant hay, a lopsided bell tower in Andrichev. Almost all of Gritsai's works feature a monotonous gray-earth palette, dark huts, old grass... Attention to detail gives rise to an accurate image of the village, the artist's eye stops for a long time on the most seemingly prosaic, ordinary.

- He saw the signs of that time - the doom of rural life, his final departure, - says the professor of the Surikov Institute, artist Sergei Gavrilyachenko. - And he expressed it in his own way - not strained, not plotted, calmly, through the images of the house, nature.

... The artist was returning after dark. And if the weather was bad, he worked at home. For example, above the still life "Mushroom Time": white, oily, mushrooms are scattered on a wide, strong table. The dog Paw is sleeping under the table, outside the window are yellow leaves, autumn. And here is the "Gornitsa": the floor swept to sterility, a clean table with a samovar, no one around - for some reason everything resembles the hut cleaned on the eve of its burning and flooding from "Farewell to Matera" by Elem Klimov and Larisa Shepitko.

Meanwhile, exhibitions of paintings by Alexander Gritsai cannot be found on sites with guides to "all the entertainment in Moscow." Probably because his art is not entertainment, but an occasion to think.

The exhibition of paintings by Alexander Gritsai will last until March 11.

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