Everything old IS NEW AGAIN
GUENNADI KALININE RECREATES ITALIAN RENAISSANCE PAINTINGS
In focusing only on the head and shoulders, Kalinine has painted what might easily pass for a Renaissance type of portrait, even if Lippi’s is not.
A CUSTOMER asked Guennadi Kalinine, a Dundas artist, to recreate some 15th-century paintings for him. Kalinine, always ready for a painting adventure, took the plunge.
“I just tried to reconstruct and rebuild the sequence of actions of the original painter, and it brought a magic connection and recreated the feeling of past times,” he tells me.
Kalinine, 60, painter and printmaker, immigrated to Canada about 15 years ago. Trained as an artist in his native Russia, where he learned the art of icon painting, he has restored and created images for churches in Burlington and elsewhere.
He is probably best known for his landscapes and harbour scenes. And he’s created some whimsical narratives inhabited by angels and humans.
His latest series is inspired by the paintings of Italian Renaissance artists such as Botticelli, Filippo Lippi and Piero Pollaiuolo.
In the past, an artist who faithfully copied an older work was praised profusely. Contemporary post-modernism says copy, but be faithful to yourself, not the original.
So Kalinine made modifications. In some paintings they are more obvious than in others. The process was a learning experience.
“First of all, I have to watch and learn the original artwork for hours and days while painting a copy,” he says. “Most of the time, we don’t spend more than several minutes in front of a painting in a museum. Sometimes seconds. The process of copying allows me to study the technique of each master — layers, brush strokes and colour.”
Kalinine’s “After Filippo Lippi”
comes close to a female sitter in a head-and-shoulders pose. She is almost in profile, except that a bit of her left eye and eyebrow is visible. She sports an elaborate hairdo and wears a fashionable blue and white dress. She is placed in front of a blue window-like frame that recedes to reveal a landscape that includes a walled town on the right and a tiny red-roofed house and water on the left.
In the Lippi original, the woman is almost a full-length figure, hands clasped in prayer, seated on a cushioned chair. Kalinine has kept her halo and blue and white dress, which identify her as the Virgin Mary. But Lippi makes her identity clearer since she appears in the company of the Christ child flanked by two angels.
Kalinine has modified the rocky landscape to the right of Mary and cropped out a craggy mountain by moving Lippi’s painted frame toward her.
Moreover, Kalinine’s style is looser than Lippi’s, which looks more sculptural, more hard-edged. And Kalinine paints with acrylics, not tempera.
In focusing only on the head and shoulders, Kalinine has painted what might easily pass for a Renaissance type of portrait, even if Lippi’s is not.
For “After Piero Pollaiuolo,”
Kalinine turns to a Renaissance portrait. Pollaiuolo painted the head and shoulders of an aristocratic woman in a profile pose. Kalinine placed his sitter against a plain blue background.
Pollaiuolo set his sitters against skies with subtle clouds.
In this series, Kalinine is working on something new — for him — borrowed from old. But that also applies to the artists Kalinine works with.
In the Renaissance, artists sought to recreate the art of ancient Rome. The profile pose was one example of how they believed — wrongly it turns out — they were reviving the style of old Roman painted portraits.
As for Kalinine’s elaborate frames, he made his own — in the mood of the Renaissance.
For more information, go to gkstudio.ca.
“Most of the time, we don't spend more than several minutes in front of a painting in a museum. Sometimes seconds. The process of copying allows me to study the technique of each master — layers, brush strokes and colour.”
GUENNADI KALININE Fine artist