The peregrination's of Edward Putinsev

In our technological time itinerary drawing seems unnecessary: there is a photo-camera with its mechanical accuracy, and stills fixe the color and character from nature. Any tourist - this rather unrespectable curtailed word has replaced solemn - reverent «traveler» - arms himself with a camera and hastily snaps from the window of a tourist bus to the left - to the right, and everybody brings home a lot of images and videos practically all of a kind... ut inevitably tinted with that curiosity, that great joy of discovery, which accompanies a prime comer.

And what a pleasure is to meet an alive drawing in this sea of technical impersonality, the drawing that keeps the vigilance of the artist's eye, the movement of his hand! How infinitely touching is his tender and careful accuracy, which is born not by the camera's indifference but by admiration of a man, who has forgotten himself before the splendor and beauty of a landscape, before the inspiration and harmony of architecture, and who has carefully and reverently reproduced in drawing this harmony and beauty! discovery, which accompanies a prime comer.

And if the artist has also a brilliant ingenuity of a draftsman and a virtuously accurate eye of an architect, as Edward Putintsev - the architect and the artist does, then quick water-color etudes and pen-made sketches from the road album, the composite landscapes, more durable, but inalterably made and finished on location, find the sense, which art brought in itself originally. We - the spectators - do not just get acquainted with a beautiful «view», the artist's mood interpenetrate into us, and so does his enthusiastic prayer «ad gloria» of the Lord's creature. Because what the real art is as not a prayer before the image of nature, of Man - of the Earth and all therein!

The «geography» of Edward Putintsev's peregrinations makes an impression by its variety: Malta and the Yenisei river, Corsica and Baltia, Sicily and Pskov, Mongolia and Arctic Circle, Cuba and Africa... But all this does not arouse such amazement: the XXth century has dislodged the notions on time and space, reduced the distances.

Many of our contemporaries can boast that they have itinerated the whole world, have been to the most far-away corners. But what astounds and astonishes in E. Putintsev - that is that he does not fly, does not flounce, but as if wanders from land to land, as a pedestrian ranger, as a pilgrim to the holy places. n - of the Earth and all therein!

He looks closely to each crook of a river, each curve of a road, interlacement of black branches at white snow.

«Nothing is accidental or happens by chance. As a figure has its anatomy, so does a mountain. So does a tree» - says Zurab Tsereteli.

In his aquarelles Edward Putintsev lances just an «anatomy», not the outer «integument» of nature but the construction, the unrepeatable inner structure of everything that comes out before his eyes, what is it soever: a building, a mountain, a mound covered with snow or a tree against the background of the sky.

A feeling of the volume, consistency of the ground, stone, sand - the «construction materials» of nature - is characteristically his feature as an architect, as a creator of material forms. But E.Putintsev has also a thing that anybody but all the architects do possess - a feeling of color, an ability to reproduce some delicate gradations of tincture, nuances of lighting. He begins his work over an aquarelle not from the drawing but from the color, he takes the main ratio of colors. On the dump paper he suffuses the planes of the sky, of water, ground, of the building's silhouette and only afterwards he draws the particularities, specifies the contours, «matures» the details. In this method there is something from the graphics of the «World of Art»; at will you can notice a propinquity of some E.Putintsev's water-colors such as «Spain. Good by Montserrat» of 1998 or «Karelia. Mount Sampo» of 1994 with the aquarelles of I.Bilibin.

But as a whole the work of Putintsev is individual enough and this individuality manifests itself not in his texture, even not in his manner, which is strictly realistic, but in the artist's very personal attitude towards his nature. Taking one water-color you would not know the soul of the Master, but when a whole panorama of his works spreads out before you, then quite insensibly you drop into that mood, which caught the artist each time when he sank into work. Together with him you aggregate, communicate to the beauty which was opening before the rapt eyes of the first discoverer.

Yes, just so: thousands of people came with him to the walls of ancient temples of Armenia, visited Samarkand and Riga, passed along the stony paths of the Crimea and Karelia, saw the same landscapes, delighted with the same monuments of antiquity which E.Putintsev has seen and was delighted with. But it was him, just him - Edward Putintsev, who had discovered them for himself for the first time and stopped, overwhelmed, and he had espoused himself to them to the marrow of one's bones, up to the last verge of his creative work. He had anthemed them, recreated them and designed them as an architect.

«And the evening and the morning were the first day»...

Whatever the appearances, but architect as an artist is closer than anybody to that creating of the Beautyful from the chaos and nonentity, which is appropriate to the Demiurge of the heaven and earth, of the world visible and invisible...