Gennady Raishev was born in 1933, in a Siberian village on the Salym River, where it flows into the great Ob River. These places have since time immemorial been populated by the Khantys, a Siberian ethnic minority who live by hunting and fishing. The Raishevs, Khantys from the Irtysh River, and the Konev5, old-time Siberian residents, moved to these parts during the Civil War of 1918-1920. Raishev's life and work have been determined by the coming together of these two Siberian clans, "the two rivers", as the artist calls them.
His brightest visual impressions - the "infinite spaces" of water, of the skies above, of the field and forest right behind the village - come from his childhood. His early years were clouded with trials: his father, a victim of Stalin's repressions, was murdered in 1938; during the war young Gennady was forced to give up school and take up hunting. It was the basic harmony of rural life that later came to sustain his creative work.
His studies at the philological faculty of Leningrad Pedagogical Institute named after A.I. Herzen in 1954-1959, as well as at an evening Arts School and in the Arts Academy contributed to Raishev's artistic formation.
Gennady Raishev the artist has inherited the mythological thinking of a Northern forest people, its fairy tales, legends and superstitions. His work displays kinship with his people's mythology and lore not only in its topics, but also in the manner of presentation, in feeling of space, rhythm and patterns.
Raishev's art has gone a long and complicated way. Apart from a sensitive perception and an intuitive feeling for colour his works of the early 60's show that the young artist thoroughly understood and mastered the major artistic trends of the time. Yet Raishev has always sought to find his own vivid language of expression.
The artist perceives canvas as space he moves across, just as he does in real life, while hunting. This is how he himself describes his method: "If I go up from the lower edge of the canvas, I see the picture in front, to my left and right. Having painted this, I move on, further up, going to the upper edge of the canvas. Then I take a look at it: there are lots of pictures on the canvas. A vast land. If I stand in the middle of the canvas, I can see things in front, on my left and on my right, t turn round - and see the things I have left behind as very small. That's the way I paint".
The images in Raishev's paintings do not lend themselves easily to an explicit verbal rendering, to an unambiguous interpretation. They always have a multi-layered structure. There is a stratum of direct observation of nature: the golden sunset sky above the gloomy forest wall. But there is also a whole work of personifications of folklore characters, with the sunset over the forest turning into a mask of the "Mistress of the Forest". Panoramas of his vast native land alternate with "close-ups". One can almost sinl into the soft carpet of the sweet-smelling earth inhabited by giris-birdcherries, women-cloudberries, grass muzhiks (peasants), and ubiquitous ducks.
Yes, these images, whether borrowed or created by the artist, spring up from local folklore, they are rooted in the people's collective consciousness. But Raishev is one of the few artists that have the ability to translate mythological consciousness not superficially, but naturally and emotionally, into the language of modern, highly individualized creative work.
Gennady Raishev's work is phenomena! because it manifests a rare fusion of ancient folklore and closeness to nature with Russian artistic culture as well as with the experience and sophistication of contemporary European art.
