Series of drawings «Ataman» by Natalia Shalagina
Young Novosibirsk painter Natalia Shalagina chooses various themes for her artworks: architectural and natural landscapes, portraits and still life, ethnographic sketches. The painter's artworks are characterized by laconism, true color scores, and most importantly, attentive, delicate attitude to the object of the image, the ability to use art means to find the necessary solution and the correct concept of the picture.
After making the first steps at the exhibition you can feel special spiritual atmosphere. It comes from the art space of pictures, full of author’s thoughts and energy. The drawing series "Ataman" has true value and it fills the viewer with poetry:
After graduation from Novosibirsk Art School in the period from 2008 to 2012 Shalagina had made long lasting trips to the Black Sea shore in Krasnodar region. The southern sun, warm air and local colour swirled young painter. She worked a lot and productively in a variety of techniques, was not afraid to experiment, made portraits of relatives, comprehended the beauty of the nature, its various states, poetry of architecture in its relationship with the landscape. During this period, improved not only artistic handwriting and knowledge of laws of realistic drawing: the accuracy of proportions, anatomical structure, sculpting forms and showing of space, the composition, but also developed power of observation, convincingness of psychological characteristics.
A kind of creative Mecca for N. Shalagina became an open-air Museum-exhibition complex "Ataman", located on the shore of Taman Bay in the village of Taman in Krasnodar region – a natural ethnographic standard of Kuban Cossack culture, extremely varied, beautiful and generous. It is not surprising that here the painter made a series of drawing artworks, allowing the viewer to travel hundreds of years back in the past, to feel the spirit of the Cossacks, their unique charisma. Decorative and laconic folk motifs: white-walled Kurens with homespun mats on the floor; passionate conversations between beautiful Cossack; boats and nets on the sea coast; beetroot soup cafe and a smithy, near which strand horses; a bearded trader with Kuban land goods... Ethnographic drawings are of great value for the painter. Fast full-scale sketches of street scenes, landscapes are precious material for creative memory, exercises for eyes and hands, unique treasure trove of personal impressions.
Drawing sheets of "Ataman" series are full of warmth and love, they are made on colored paper of warm ochre tones with tempera and pencil with acrylic using. The composition is based on a combination of line and color, on the contrast of dark and light. The drawings reveal the desire for simplified forms and locally colored objects, they do not have tonal stretch marks, line modeling. Shalagina’s drawings are tricolor, but the author show sunny atmosphere; create a sense of the southern warm air. Looking at the quiet rhythms of the lines, skillful combination of color spots, peace flows into the soul of the viewer. Character feature of the painter is sunshine. It is seen not only in the background, coloring, but there is also a spiritual, not obvious show of this sunshine, and perhaps even this underlies the force of attraction of the author's paintings, carrying healing energy.