"Gleams of the Rising Sun" School of Japanese painting by Levasheva Irina. In the framework of the cross-year Russia-Japan

The aim of the exhibition is the formation of a developed aesthetic taste, the popularization of creativity, recognition of its decisive importance in the formation of personality.

The school of Japanese painting by I. Levasheva was founded in 2013 on the basis of the Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art. Pupils of the school are people of different professions and ages. During the training, more than 20 people received traditional Japanese artists with a creative name. Two hieroglyphs, the first name of the teacher and the second name of the student, are carved on the seal. During training, many original students appeared, whose work is presented at the exhibition, following the works of the teacher: Gavrilchenko Tatyana, Grigoryeva Anna, Kozlova Marina, Martynova Anastasia, Morachevskaya Ekaterina, Telitsyna Nadezhda, Chermyshentseva Larisa, Chernyavskaya Natalya, Shestak Vera.

Like Irina’s, the students’s works use similar tricks, as well as themes that, on the one hand, are connected with the origins of “Suybokug” and refer to Japanese motives, and on the other hand, the artist cannot help but write that everyone surrounds him day at home or traveling, hence the many Russian and European motifs.

Irina Anatolyevna Levasheva has been studying painting “Suybokug” since 2003 and has already managed to become a celebrity in this field. This is evidenced by numerous exhibitions in Russia and abroad, catalogs, articles and reports, including on the channel "Culture". She was awarded a silver medal for her contribution to Russian fine art from the Creative Union of Russian Artists. In 2007, Irina received the master’s jasper seal, with the creative name “Little Rei,” which means “Beautiful Peony,” and at the same time, the right to teach Japanese painting (a diploma issued in Tokyo in 2014 confirmed this right.

Thirty works were presented at the exhibition, mainly from recent years, but the City of Memories (2012) was also included, for which the author received a diploma from the Shusaku Academy training center at the exhibition-competition “500 Best Works of the Year”. It is interesting that all the works are associated with the image of water (the genre of “mountains-water”), in its various forms or associations: a water lotus in the artist’s hands (“Self-portrait”), shrimps pulled out of the sea (“Shrimps”), wide expanses of the Urals rivers ("Verkhoturye"), bursts of mountain streams jumping over stones ("Mountain River", "Izborsk. Slovenian Keys") or the expanse of a quiet lake ("I clapped my hands loudly…", Basso; "For birch Russia…") but also misty gave the mountain peaks ("Journey of Dreams"). The work “The Road to the Temple” perfectly illustrates the wonderful verse of the already mentioned Keizo Shurin (“Enjoying flowering in the Mountain Temple”; translated from English by S. Tarhanova): “Walking in the depths of green hills, I would like to be a raven in the evening; under a white cherry in the House of King Karma; the monk there does not think to regret the passing spring: the hour has come and he again rings the bell, making the petals fall off. "

Painting “Suibokuga” or “Sumi-e” is a very ancient tradition, the origins of which go back to Chinese art of the 7th – 10th centuries. In the XIV century. It was borrowed by the artistic environment of Japan, where it reached its peak. The founder of “Suybokug” in Japan was the Zen monk Sesshu, who spent many years in China studying painting, and returning to his homeland, opened his own school. A number of new subjects have entered the already established tradition; new writing techniques have been developed. Despite its conservatism, but rather, precisely because of it, in the modern art world, “Suibokuga” looks relevant and fresh, opening up new means of expressiveness and pristine depths of cognition of the world. Other works of medieval masters look as if they were created by a living master.

Candidate of Art Svetlana Tarhanova.