Every year, the art therapy department of the psychiatric hospital of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, much better known as the Buckle, puts the work of its patients on public display. So it is now. Treatment with art actually helps mentally ill people achieve harmony with the world around them.
This time, the portrait of Vladimir Putin was among the subjects created by those who are usually called “crazy”.
The unusual painting is called: “V.V. Putin.” It is perhaps impossible with common sense to understand that it is the current president of Russia who is depicted on the canvas. And the artist from Pryazhka sees the head of our state exactly like this. The lady admitted that she captured the Leningrad guy Volodya in his early youth, at the window, and the most expressive part of the masterpiece are his eyes. Oddly enough, the neighbors of the woman, who has suffered from schizophrenia for many years, unmistakably recognize Vladimir Vladimirovich in this portrait (even without seeing the signature, which was made exclusively for the exhibition). Compared to the rest of the paintings, which depict the pills that hospital residents have to take every day and painful procedures with injections, the presidential portrait does not look very organic.
However, there are other famous personalities in the exhibition. Mikhail Boyarsky, for example, who is present in as many as two portraits. In the first one, painted by the same author of Putin’s image, it is problematic to recognize a face familiar to everyone. But in another drawing, Mikhail Sergeevich looks alive.
According to psychiatrists, their patients most often depict what is the most vivid impression of recent times for them. By the way, diagnostic methods based on drawings of mentally ill people are based on this. If in the case of an actor, the driving force behind the creation of a painting could be a film watched on TV, then in the case of Putin, not everything is so simple. Considering that the masterpiece dates back to the beginning of 2005, the monetization of benefits, which hit the mentally ill in the same way as other least protected segments of the population, could have prompted its creation.
Andrey IVANOV