Artist Sahnenko Ivan

Was born on October 5, 1948 in d. Osye, Vitebsk region, Belarus.

In 1972 he graduated from the Vitebsk Pedagogical Institute, Art and Graphic Faculty.Since 1986, a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR.

Works in the genre of landscape, still life, thematic paintings. Participant of international, republican, regional exhibitions. Personal exhibitions were held in 1988 and 1993 at the Palace of Arts in Minsk, in 2008 at the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, as well as in Vitebsk, Polotsk, Novopolotsk, Mogilev, Bobruisk, Pskov, Novogrudok, Smolensk, in Germany. The works are in the collections of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Belarus, the Union of Artists of the Republic of Belarus, the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, the Museum of Modern Art of Minsk. O.A. Skovorodko's paintings are kept in the museums of Smolensk, Pskov, Vologda, Mogilev, Vitebsk, Polotsk, Grodno, Ryazan, Shchetin (Poland), Frankfurt on the Oder (Germany). Participant of 19 international, republican and regional exhibitions.

Personal exhibitions: Minsk-Palace of Arts, Mogilev, Bobruisk, Pskov, Novgorod, Smolensk.

Participated in exhibitions of Belarusian artists abroad: England, France, Estonia, Lithuania, Germany.

Took part in international plein airs:
Shagalovsky plein air Vitebsk
Plein air dedicated to F.Skariny Minsk
Plein Air <Meshcherskiye Dali> G. Kosimov, Russia
Plein Air <Oder-panorama> Frankfurt on the Oder, Germany.

The works were acquired by: The National Art Museum of Belarus, the Museum of Modern Art, Minsk.

Art museums: Smolensk, Mogilev, Grodno, Vitebsk, Polotsk.
Lives and works in Vitebsk.

Vitebsk painter Oleg Skovorodko is a confident and energetic master with his own creative handwriting and a view of the world, whose works are marked by a riot of juicy colors, intense and formally constructed composition, a living connection with nature. You can't stop warming up near his canvases. They have warmth and sincerity, attention to the eternal problems of human existence. The artist explores the life around him: he paints villages with archaic wooden houses having traditional simple shapes; huge totem trees with white tablecloths-clouds spread over them; panoramic landscapes painted with delicate color combinations; still lifes with classical attributes of the material world, including flowers, vegetables, fruits, herbs, ceramics... His works are distinguished by texture, materiality, formal stylization, figurative symbolism. Oleg Skovorodko does not spare sonorous chords, denies greyness, calmness, lethargy. But it does not exaggerate the contrast of color combinations, softens tension with semitones, shadows. At the same time, he confidently and boldly generalizes the form. It does not adapt to the tastes of customers and the demands of the market. The main thing for him has always been and remains the desire to express love for people close to him and his native land.
The artist lives in constant dialogue with time and with himself, he is both open to the world and closed in himself. His work cannot be taken in a straightforward way. In easel paintings Oleg Skovorodko builds complex spatial compositions, monumental in sound, generically decorative in plastic solution. They reflect the author's philosophy of life, in which the main place is occupied by the issues of the momentary and eternal, earthly and heavenly, past and present. There is no life writing in his canvases, but there is being, there are faces of people who live in spiritual harmony with themselves. This is a sublime world, it is divorced from the private and insignificant. In the works of Oleg Skovorodko, the breath of the XX, already and XXI centuries is felt. The core system of his art is complex, but there is no hermeticism in his work - the transmission of the hidden essence of things, accessible only to enlightened viewers, there is not even a desire for it. "Everything that has no tradition becomes plagiarism," wrote the philosopher Evhenia d'Orsay-i-Ravira. This statement is especially important in relation to contemporary art. In recent decades, the aggressive hordes of images created by art have become almost denser and more active than real nature. Indeed, it is impossible to create anything completely free from traditions today - everything else becomes direct borrowing and self-deception. "Having learned the rules, you achieve success in changes," said the Chinese painter Shitao.

Oleg Skovorodko's creativity is a special phenomenon in Belarusian art. His works successfully combine the achievements of different art schools, classical and avant-garde, the influence of Art Nouveau, impressionism, transferred to the soil of Belarusian reality, is felt. The figurative system of the artist's works is based on sensory and emotional perception. His paintings are filled with complex associations, they are not perceived unambiguously. As a student of the Art and Graphic Faculty of the Vitebsk Pedagogical Institute, he painted rural expanse, this romantic kingdom with distinctive semantic and color poetics, conditional compositional organization of the canvas space. However, later, for example, in the painting "Autumn Candles", the usual idyllic, at first glance, scene with a goat grazing in a meadow near a village woman in a headscarf, to which a graceful roe deer clings from the other side, is perceived by reasoning about magical symbols linking the birth and death of a person.
The artist's paintings witness a meeting with an interesting creator who has his own expressive style, the plasticity of the pictorial language - emotional, expressive. The images of his works seem mysterious and mysterious, and the genre chosen by the author does not matter here: the artist enthusiastically paints female images, flowers in vases, village houses, landscapes, where not only nature dominates, but the essence of the author himself reincarnated in waves of color and harmony. The artist is also interested in urban views. But he does not deal with the problems of urban life, as he considers it too pragmatic and not worth his attention. He paints old streets and monuments of Vitebsk antiquity, and himself at an easel on the old square ...
The appeal of Oleg Skovorodko's works lies in their balancing between the accuracy of the form, the plot and the abstraction of the disclosure of this form. What seems to be more specific than a portrait? The artist captures the essence of a person, but does not convey it classically. It comes from an emotional impression, from an image that should excite, set up for reflection. A woman, the artist argues, is a moment of beauty, and this moment should be noticed and captured at least on the canvas. Hence - unrealistically elongated, as if moving, female figures, long swan necks, small heads, emphasized naked female forms. But in the female images of Oleg Skovorodko there is no open eroticism. This could roughly break the finest fleur of poetic charm, which gives each heroine mystery and attraction.

His still lifes with objects of rural life are impressive, simple and genuinely sincere, filled with a sense of real being. But Oleg Skovorodko paints landscapes with a special feeling of intoxicating joy. Rustic, with steep endless hills and lakes, which he remembers from childhood. Urban, where the streets are flooded with mysterious light of lanterns, which deprives them of everyday life and because of excessive urbanization. The artist's landscapes are attractive, unusual. They are written as if from nature, but at the same time they are filled with their own fantasies and impressions. The master transfers what he sees to the canvas, cutting off everything superfluous, secondary, temporary. People's faces disappear, then the people themselves disappear. Buildings lose their windows, but acquire reflections, instead of the traditional mottled sky - a blankly painted plane, and trees become like shadows. If he draws a familiar landscape, it seems that he deliberately seeks to avoid those signs by which the viewer could recognize a particular place. In landscapes, the main thing for the author is not the content, but the mood. Oleg Skovorodko is not an open-air artist. He paints his paintings according to his inner ideas about things and people.

In recent years, the painter has moved away from the concreteness of a separate theme and plot, from the locality of figurative language. Oleg Skovorodko's works are dominated by the free element of color. His paintings are peculiar complex "color fantasies", where fresh plastic ideas are read in unusual structural connections. The artist enlivens nature, strives to build a composition through the soulful plasticity of color compounds, through harmony and dissonance of cold and warm shades. His paintings cannot be called "symphonies", rather the designation "jazz improvisations" fits them.

"Amalgam" is an abstract, constructivist and at the same time deeply plastic, aesthetically verified pictorial work with a multi-valued and organically connected dramaturgy of composition. The picture can be compared to a piece of music, which is also abstract in its essence. Contemplation of the work easily creates the illusion of "video listening", since our inner musical ear is also included in the process of perception. Visual images evoke simple, but consonant with music associations, and no other accompaniment is needed.