Vasili Pavlovich
Borisenkov
Vasili Borisenkov was born October 1, 1924 in the village of Mikhailov-Pogost, Pskov region. He has been living in Leningrad since 1930. He began his professional career at the Secondary Art School attached to the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1948 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts and graduated from it in 1954. His teachers there were V.M. Oreshnikov, A.A. Mylnikov, P.P. Belousov, and A.L. Koroljev. His creative activity was greatly influenced by the traditions of Russian Art and painters such as Levitan, Kuinji, Serov, Surikov, Repin, and others.
The main body of Borisenkov’s artworks are genre pictures and landscapes. He has always tried to depict the life around him in realistic from. He often travels to Siverskaya, a community in a forested area where artists gather. Borisenkov emphasizes that Russia’s greatest treasure in nature. His plain-air paintings give testimony to this ideal. His subjects include the Black Sea, the Baltic republics, and the Caucasus Mountains. He likes to depict industrial scenes in addition to his landscapes. Borisenkov was influenced by the Russian Artist Sergei Ivanov, a painter of Russian and old world themes at the turn-of-the-century.
The general emotional coloring of the pictures of the 1930s and post-war period was determined by a sense of historic optimism, born out of the realization that socialism was winning and that people’s lives should be built on this new basis. High patriotism became especially characteristic of works devoted to W.W.II. Depicting those hard times, the artist felt his unity with the Soviet land and the Soviet people very acutely. The theme of the heroic defense of the Motherland found its reflection in many of Borisenkov’s pictures of that time.
In the post war period the artist was drawn to the deep ties that people felt to the world as a universal form of existence. Thus art became a means of philosophical cognition of life and self-expression. This attention to the surroundings of every event that happens is a theme that he still works with today.
Borisenkov was a participant in a number of All-Union and regional exhibitions as well as exhibitions of W.W.II veterans. His works are now in private collections in Australia, France, Finland, and the United States.