About Yaroslav Kurbanov

My attitude to Art in general and to my art in particular is defined with following points:

- There must be an idea in a piece of art, regardless of whether it is new or supratemporal. The main point is, it should move the spectator, wake up his feelings and invite him to reflection. Nowadays artists try often to shock spectators and to replace all other emotions, that art is actually called to awake, with a jar.

- An artist should find a suitable material as well as an appropriate technique and a form in order to express his idea best.

- A piece of art must be accomplished professionally.

  In my work I touch upon the themes, which are important for me personally. When rereading classical literature, I realized, though, that the same themes have moved people also a hundred years ago or even earlier. They are Love and Hate, Faith and Betrayal, Fear and Composure, Discrepancies between human's inner world and his outer image, his "Mask", which he wears for the others. The time has no power over these themes. This distinguishes them from many daily sensations, which fall into oblivion in a couple of years, months or sometimes even days. The spiritual values stir people as much as in the past and as before they try to find the answers to the same questions: Who am I? Where have I gone? What is the meaning of life? What is happiness? What is love? Our inner world tries again and again to find answers to these questions in the outer world. My art is my attempt to answer these questions.

  The task of technical and aesthetic implementation is to express the main idea clearly and completely.

I believe to choose the most suitable implementation for my themes, namely realism.

  As almost every artist I use symbols in my work. There have always been symbols in the art, because art is not a mirror that reflects the world directly. The art symbolism has both now and always built on spectators, which perceive the symbols simply and naturally, for they have existed also in their daily routines. Each time has however its own symbols language. A still life from 18th century could tell its contemporaries a whole story, now it is for us not more than a set of objects. The modern art and modern spectators have their own up-to-date symbols.

  By means of the paintings' names I try both to make the spectators more aware of my symbols and to lead them to the subject, touching on in my work. I believe that everyone understands the work idea, interprets and develops it in his own way, though. I do not purpose to impose my opinion on spectators. Everyone has his own view of the world around. That way a silent dialog develops between a piece of art and a spectator.

  A fast pace of life and an enormous volume of information drag us often into a doom loop, where we run like a hamster in his running wheel and have no time to think about our life. If the spectator has been distracted from his everyday worries and haste and has reflected about the timeless subjects for even a couple of minutes, I can argue, that my art fulfilled its task.