The National Art Museum exhibition features works from Nikolay’s entire career as an artist, which spans forty years. He has developed his own style, across various techniques: from early watercolours to engravings, encompassing landscapes, portraits, and thematic works. He skilfully combines colour and line to create his expressive pieces.
The Polesie area, located in the Ptich River valley, is known for its majestic oak forests and extensive marshes, and for the unusual lifestyle of its residents. Mr. Dubrova was born there and spent his childhood in Polesie, so it’s hardly surprising that it’s his main source of inspiration. Mr. Dubrova evokes abandoned and ruined cottages, in the Chernobyl area, showing his sincere affection for the land and his anxiety for its future. He is candid and honest in his portrayals, which keeping his works expressive. They are easily recognisable.
Polesie is distinguished by a wealth of colour, skilfully reproduced in his paintings. A graduate from the Graphics Department, he has created a large number of works in a monochrome graphic manner, using a restrained palette. He conveys emotional through subtleties of brushstroke.
In his pictures Mr. Dubrova reflects on the eternal mysteries of nature and of human life, which are closely associated. He explores the endless cycle of life, in which we are but one part. His works offer a hymn to Polesie: for its men and its landscapes. Friends and colleagues arrived to congratulate Mr. Dubrova on his show and the Deputy General Director for Scientific and Educational Work at the National Art Museum, Natalia Selitskaya, delivered a speech. Among those present were Grigory Sitnitsa (who is not only the Chairman of the Belarusian Union of Artists and President of the International Confederation of Unions of the CIS Artists but an honourable member of the Russian Arts Academy), Prof. Vladimir Savich (an Honoured Figure of Arts of Belarus and a laureate of the State Award), Lyubov Klepchukova (the Head of the Education, Sports and Tourism Department at the Mozyr District Executive Committee), and Gennady Govor (an artist, poet, inventor and a member of the International Union of Writers and Artists). Talented Boris Frenkel, a student of the Republican Gymnasium-College of the Belarusian State Music Academy, created a lyrical mood for the party, playing the piano and oboe.
МТ REFERENCE:
Nikolay Dubrova was born in the village of Berezovka ( Gomel Region, Mogilev District) on January 15th, 1952. He graduated from the Savitsky Art School in Penza in 1972, the Graphics Department of the Belarusian Theatre and Art Institution (now the Belarusian State Academy of Arts) in 1982 (preparing his diploma work under the guidance of the People’s Artist of Belarus — Vasily Sharangovich).
Mr. Dubrova is a member of the Belarusian Union of Artists since 1988 and is participating in art exhibitions since 1978. He lives and works in Mozyr since 1982. The artist lectured at the Department of Fine Arts and Graphics at the Shamyakin Mozyr State Pedagogical University. Since 2001, he heads the studio for art amateurs — Farby — at the Mozyr Centre for Children and Youth’ state educational establishment.
In 2003 , the painter obtained a state scholarship of culture and art workers of the Republic of Belarus for the design of an art gallery.
He works in watercolour, engraving, easel painting in genres of landscape, portrait and thematic painting and his pieces are kept at the National Art Museum of Belarus, in the Belarusian Union of Artists, in museums and galleries of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine as well as in private collections of Belarus and abroad.
By Veniamin Mikheev
