Windows of light

Priest Andrey Mizyuk - in memory of the artist who knew how to draw the invisible

He painted the world. And when the time came, I simply switched over to it.

I was lucky enough to once meet him in person and visit him. In Penza. In those other times. It was an immersion and an opportunity to look “through the windows.” When he took out his works and I looked at them, I caught myself feeling that my eyes were hurting. Yes, something like this when, leaving a dark room, you look out the window in the early morning. Exactly “through the windows”.

On May 1 in Penza, at the age of ninety, Valentin Pavlovich Massov, a painter, watercolorist, creator of a new direction in art - “spiritual realism”, completed his earthly journey. He was born in the Ulyanovsk region in 1937. Graduated from the Penza Art College. Was admitted to the Union of Artists of the USSR. In early childhood, he was orphaned, lived in an orphanage, and experienced hunger and deprivation. One of the master’s vivid memories was an episode from childhood, a memory of a prayer that his aunt performed in the evenings, and she then told him to remember this prayer and carry it through life. His mother died before the war, his father died at the front.

The artist himself recalled: “I was four years old when they bought colored pencils for my older brother. I took these pencils and said: “I won’t give it back.” And a person dear to me, my mother’s sister, said: “Don’t touch him, he will be an artist.”

The gift that the Lord awarded him was with him all his life, he spoke about it simply:

“At the beginning it was unconscious, but the more you love, the more you know, and the more you know, the more you love. This is development." But to tell about what his path was and how he developed, no journalistic format is enough; a book is unlikely to fit. This is a must see. And I was lucky.

The masses did not recognize Soviet modernity; they put spokes in their wheels “with all my heart” and from union-artistic mediocrity. Activists and officials from the cultural cabinets were indifferent and unceremonious. To this day, none of the official collections in Penza contain his works.

It's difficult to say why this is so. Once Massov himself remarked bitterly: “In recent years, I have been thinking a lot about Russia. Talents have never been honored here. They were trampled. I love my homeland very much and, even when there was an opportunity to leave it, I did not think about it. Now I think that my work is not for Russia.”

The most interesting thing I learned about Massov was not from his paintings (to my shame, I had never even seen photographs of his works before). Everything happened thanks to Sergei Kalugin’s song “White on White” and the story that the musician told about this song. Once upon a time, Massov’s paintings were brought home to him by a certain person. He took them out and showed them to the musician, and Kalugin recalled that

that these were just white canvases, and only a few moments later, peering at them, he saw that the canvases were not empty, not white, and that light was emanating from them, from which, as I said at the beginning, it hurt the eyes.

Kalugin's song is beautiful. But her hero, unlike the plot of the composition itself, turned out to be not only alive, but also very cheerful and full of this life.

This is how I saw him several years ago, when I was still living in Russia. I carefully contacted the master’s wife and his student Olga Romanova and quite easily and without any ceremony I was invited to visit the master. Fortunately, it was a very short drive from Saratov, where I lived. And I went with another friend of mine, an admirer of Kalugin’s work, and her daughter. A gray-haired, stately, out-of-this-world man met us, and we saw his world. In a completely tiny apartment where the artist huddled with his wife.

Almost all of his works, but especially some of them from the late 70s, were those same windows of light. These are indeed, at first glance, almost white sheets, and only after a moment they began to open up.

And yes, I testify: it began to sting your eyes, as if you had stepped out of a dark corridor into a large white room with windows on a bright, indescribably beautiful day.

And behind them the artist’s tiny Penza apartment was not visible, but I myself seemed to be transported into this miracle and watched it alive, not from an armchair, but like this, in front of the window, somewhere in front of the brightest unearthly bouquet of lilacs, and it seemed to me that I would now hear its smell and feel this world.

What was that? It was a meeting with the very collaboration of man with God, a happy opportunity to look at least in part at how the human hand transmits heavenly light. It conveys like a message, like a blessing and consolation. We drank tea, and I don’t remember at all what day it was then, although I know for sure that it was autumn. But I no longer noticed the colors from the car window and drove home almost mechanically, and it still seemed to me that I could not calm down and open my eyes as usual. They were still blinded and a little sore. From peace and joy. Because Heaven blesses the human race with talents and gifts. And we are lucky sometimes not to pass by them.

Thank you, dear Master. I have no doubt that you returned and became part of what your hand gave to this world. This light continues to shine. And for the world, which is now rapidly plunging into a terrible and long night, this is vitally important. The artist Massov continues to paint light. Now it's always the case.