VIK (Vyacheslav Yuryevich Zabelin) was an “individualist” artist whose work contains many sincere, truly childlike moments and subjects. For this reason, it seems important to us to clarify certain facts of his biography for the viewer.
The origins of VIK’s artistic traditions go back to the icon painters in the Zabelin family line. His grandmothers played a major role in his upbringing, since they were, in effect, the guardians of pre-revolutionary noble traditions in Soviet Russia, and it was with them that Vyacheslav spent his school years. The full “home” humanities education he absorbed from his family became a solid foundation for his worldview — one that could not be shaken by the falsehoods of communist ideology or the insistence of Soviet propaganda. This fostered in VIK a resistance to convention and an uncommitted freedom in his artistic practice. He almost never worked on state commissions and always felt sorry for those who were forced to do so.
After Stalin’s death, some easing of the ideological pressure of Socialist Realism in the USSR followed. Nonconformism and the continuous search for an original artistic language became possible. VIK and his many underground friends took advantage of this “breath of freedom” and began to explore forbidden themes in painting and literature — religion, cosmopolitanism, and eroticism — interpreting them in a prohibited, non-academic, highly individual artistic style.
Vyacheslav Zabelin began drawing in childhood. This was encouraged by the rural solitude of his grandmother’s home in the settlement of Maksatikha, a provincial place where their “family noble nest” was located, and where many who had not left Russia after the 1917 Revolution were forced to remain in hiding. VIK’s father was a military man who, after the Great Patriotic War, built railways in many countries around the world.VIK was exceptionally fortunate in his teachers, friends, and companions. In officers’ families it was customary to take private lessons. He was taught the basics of visual art by A. A. Mylnikov, a professor at the Repin Institute. This home instruction was neither formal nor ideological in the way education within the institute walls could be. VIK acquired strong craft skills not only in the visual arts, but also as a restorer and fine cabinet-maker.
He later entered the Serov School of Art (now the Roerich School). It was a strong school, further enriched by his experience working as a theatrical stage design artist in the leading theatres of Leningrad and at the Peterhof Museum. Of great importance in VIK’s life were “fateful” encounters, friendships, and spiritual kinships. These were many, including the pastoral guidance of Archimandrite Alipy Voronov, abbot of the Pskov-Caves Monastery (1914–1985); the writer Anastasia Tsvetaeva, sister of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva; and his friendship with astronomers from the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory and the Pulkovo Observatory, among whom academician Nikolai Kozyrev deserves special mention.
Throughout his life, VIK drew wisdom from the universe and from those around him, and with uninterrupted passion painted pictures on a wide variety of subjects and in many genres. He painted because he could not do otherwise. “For me, it is like breathing; it is my existence, and my paintings are my children.” He never once repeated himself in his compositions, radically changing his style out of fear of monotony.
VIK lived for sixty-two years, dying unexpectedly from swine flu complicated by viral pneumonia. Of those years, forty-two were devoted to his singular creative work, leaving behind several thousand pieces now held in many museums and private collections around the world, wherever vivid, original, singular, and philosophical art is valued.
It seems to us that, in his painterly temperament, VIK was close to the Romance cultures. There is an exuberance of colour, a warm and passionate energy emanating from his compositions, and a search for the “light of colour”, for a kind of “Holy Grail”, for the philosophical dimension of Being.