The Seven Winds Foundation supported the idea of making an open-air competition dedicated to the memory of Volgograd artist Viktor Losev an annual event.
On a beautiful Sunday morning on May 13, Volgograd residents came to the Simbirtsev Park with sketchbooks, easels, sheets of watercolor paper and paints. More than 50 people of all ages and professions. For example, Pavel Morozov, a composer, chairman of the Volgograd branch of the Union of Composers of Russia, became seriously interested in painting ten years ago, and it became an important part of his life. In the open air, he painted a sketch with oil, using a palette knife and trying to work in the manner of Viktor Losev.
There were several nominations in the competition. First option was to paint the city and the townspeople in the style of Losev, but the bravest participants were invited to enter into a dialogue with the most famous painters and look through their eyes at the building of the regional library. How Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky or Petr Zverkhovsky and Gleb Vyatkin would see and pictured this building? A difficult task!
It turned out to be an equally difficult task for the jury and art critic Lyubov Yakhontova to choose the winners. Pavel Morozov and Elena Pavlova received special awards from the Seven Winds Foundation – the art albums “Petr Zverkhovsky” and “Gleb Vyatkin”.
“I would like artists and their works to be appreciated during their lifetime,— Lyubov Yakhontova noted. – In this sense, the fate of Viktor Losev is indicative.” Viktor Losev is a Volgograd painter with a classical impressionist fate in the post–war Soviet Union: he was not accepted into the Union of Artists, he did not have a single exhibition.
In 1969, Viktor Losev’s early works were burned by the owner of the basement in which he worked. The artist himself was kicked out of the basement. He didn’t have his own workshop. He began to paint the city and the citizens right on the streets and give his paintings to people. He held his exhibitions right on the streets — hung paintings on trees. Instead of canvases and paper, he used the reverse side of drawings picked up in the trash at the Institute of Urban Economy. But it was Losev who created the most accurate and vivid pictorial history of Volgograd!
