The museum’s collection includes an unusual genre painting “Autumn Will Soon Be Here”. It was created by a People’s Artist of Mordovia Stepan Fedorovich Korotkov who was born in 1956. After graduating from the Saransk Art College, the painter worked in the genres of landscape, still life, and interior portrait, and restored oil paintings. In his works, Stepan Korotkov referenced famous works of art, for example, icons of Andrei Rublev or suprematist compositions of Kazimir Malevich. The artist creatively reinterpreted the heritage of the masters, imbuing famous images with sunlight.
Sunlight is a recognizable artistic tool of Stepan Korotkov, which is present in all his paintings. With the help of light, the artist places accents and conceptually highlights the most important parts of the canvas. Sunlight has become one of the main means of artistic expression in the painting “Autumn Will Soon Be Here”.
At first glance, the plot of the picture is quite simple: a plank wall, a brick foundation, a porch with three steps and a door with a padlock. Sunlight falls in a wide band from left to right. The image of dried climbing plants and the restrained color palette indicate the coming of autumn.
However, this is not a random wall. This is a wall of the bathhouse in the courtyard of Fedot Sychkov’s house. He is considered the founder of professional fine arts in Mordovia. At the turn of the 1990s, a group of young artists including Evgeny Balakshin, Vladimir Karasev and Stepan Korotkov used this bathhouse as a workshop, so they were nicknamed “bathers”.
Subsequently, the artists’ paths diverged, and the buildings on Rabochaya Street in the city of Saransk are now gone. The work of Stepan Korotkov became a pictorial testimony of that time. The objects in the canvas serve as conceptual symbols. Thus, the light falls on the wall and the door, which seems to keep the memory of the artists and the creative atmosphere.
By depicting seemingly ordinary, unremarkable objects in a laconic manner, the artist created a lyrical, soft, and bright image that eternalizes his imaginative youth.
Sunlight is a recognizable artistic tool of Stepan Korotkov, which is present in all his paintings. With the help of light, the artist places accents and conceptually highlights the most important parts of the canvas. Sunlight has become one of the main means of artistic expression in the painting “Autumn Will Soon Be Here”.
At first glance, the plot of the picture is quite simple: a plank wall, a brick foundation, a porch with three steps and a door with a padlock. Sunlight falls in a wide band from left to right. The image of dried climbing plants and the restrained color palette indicate the coming of autumn.
However, this is not a random wall. This is a wall of the bathhouse in the courtyard of Fedot Sychkov’s house. He is considered the founder of professional fine arts in Mordovia. At the turn of the 1990s, a group of young artists including Evgeny Balakshin, Vladimir Karasev and Stepan Korotkov used this bathhouse as a workshop, so they were nicknamed “bathers”.
Subsequently, the artists’ paths diverged, and the buildings on Rabochaya Street in the city of Saransk are now gone. The work of Stepan Korotkov became a pictorial testimony of that time. The objects in the canvas serve as conceptual symbols. Thus, the light falls on the wall and the door, which seems to keep the memory of the artists and the creative atmosphere.
By depicting seemingly ordinary, unremarkable objects in a laconic manner, the artist created a lyrical, soft, and bright image that eternalizes his imaginative youth.
