“Sir, do you happen to know whether girls are accepted as artists from the age of nine?” a lady of Balzac age attacked me right at the door of the office of the Director of the Volgograd Regional Children’s Art Gallery.
“My dear, you are at least six years late with your granddaughter!” a fashionable young woman with a mobile phone in her hand answered the curious citizen before I could even open my mouth. “My Ellochka has only just turned three, and even I am worried that I brought my child to study painting too late...”
I told Elena Orlova, Director of the Regional Children’s Art Gallery, what I had overheard, expressing my surprise at the very young age of beginning masters of the brush. She only smiled:
“To be honest, some parents, convinced that they have brought future Picassos into the world, try to bring their children to us almost straight from the maternity hospital. But in this respect I am implacable and set certain age limits. For example, our youngest studio pupil is one year and eight months old. On the one hand, he is quite a lot of trouble for the gallery’s teachers. On the other — I am one hundred percent convinced of this — the earlier a child’s God-given gift for painting is opened, the better it will be both for the child and for society...”
When in 1985 a solo exhibition of works by the little-known Russian artist Elena Orlova from Volgograd opened in the Belgian city of Liège, an elderly, kindly employee of the Brussels Cultural Centre addressed the heroine of the occasion:
“You must be a very wealthy person, Madame Orlova. In our country both a painter and a teacher of aesthetic disciplines earn very well. And you combine these two professions in one person?!”
“Yes, my fortune is indeed considerable,” Elena Vladimirovna smiled, not wishing to disappoint the foreign admirer of beauty with her poverty-level, by Western standards, income. “No joke — it amounts to as many as 75 talents...”
Most likely the Belgian official took the word “talent” to mean millions and did not ask the Russian artist any more tricky questions. Meanwhile, the “very wealthy person,” having shown her works to the Belgian public and received many favourable reviews, returned to her homeland — to her 75 pupils from the children’s studio she had organised in the hero city at the call of her soul.
Having found like-minded people among the same “advanced” teachers and innovators as herself, Honored Worker of Culture Elena Orlova spent several years pushing her idea through the higher authorities. Eventually the enthusiasts were allocated money and helped with premises in the city centre for the creation in Volgograd of the first regional Children’s Art Gallery in Russia. In 1990 this unique out-of-school institution opened, to the envy of neighbouring regions. Today one can already speak confidently about the first results of eleven years of selfless work by Elena Orlova herself and by her closest assistants: Alla Skorova, chief curator of the gallery museum; Deputy Director Alexandra Vinogradova; Larisa Smirnova, scholarship holder of the Volgograd Regional Administration; studio head Larisa Samarina; and junior researcher Nina Ovchinnikova.
Every year 300–400 studio pupils aged from 2 to 20 study at the gallery. When they go out into adult life, they do not necessarily become artists, but also architects, designers, art historians and even philologists.
At the same time, the professional achievements of the gallery’s pupils can astonish anyone. Young masters of the brush from the city on the Volga have won masses of gold, silver and bronze medals at international children’s drawing exhibitions in Germany, India, France, the Czech Republic, Macedonia and Japan. The gallery also holds UNESCO diplomas confirming the professional giftedness of young Volgograd residents. In the reference book “Children’s Museums of the World,” published two years ago in Japan, the Children’s Art Gallery from Volgograd is also named. Is that not international recognition of the merits of a team of artist-enthusiasts from the Russian provinces?
Day after day, delegations of important guests come to 26 Sovetskaya Street, where the domain of young talents is located. Among them are ambassadors of foreign states, ministers, and representatives of the business and political elite from near and far abroad. Not long ago the regional governor Nikolai Maksyuta also visited to present an award to Alisa Meshkova, winner of the international competition “My Mother Is the Best of All.”
“What, this is our famous fellow countrywoman?” the governor asked in confusion when he saw a four-year-old girl in front of him. Having made sure there was no mistake, Nikolai Kirillovich, by his own admission, was slightly shaken when he saw with his own eyes about two dozen works by “the already formed artist Alisa, with her own view of life and religion and God.” After that Maksyuta became acquainted with the paintings of other little artists.
...Do you want to know what the director of Russia’s first art gallery dreams of? To acquire a colour copier and a Risograph, and on that basis organise the first children’s publishing house in Russia, and perhaps in the world, producing books illustrated by children. And also to buy additional memory for the computer given by a former Minister of Culture and adapt it for the computer-graphics club that children need.
And since the studio pupils can draw, weave, model, paint batiks, sew and knit, Orlova also dreams of an experimental atelier within the gallery and of a “Treasure Shop” where the children could sell their handmade works. All this requires a sum of money that is ridiculous by today’s standards, but no head of a wealthy enterprise in the region is in a hurry to “find” it for the children.
For this simple reason Elena Vladimirovna Orlova, not wishing to depend on the whims of wealthy sponsors, is waiting impatiently for the day when the Russian parliament adopts a law that provides state support, not in words but in deeds, for museums and out-of-school museum institutions, one representative of which is the Volgograd Art Gallery. Its holdings contain more than 19 thousand works created by children from 36 countries. It must be said that Elena Orlova’s civic position is perfectly understandable. Yes, we have Moscow and St. Petersburg with their magnificent museums, which God Himself has ordered to be kept in excellent condition. But Russian people live in other cities of the country too, and they too should be surrounded by a cultural environment. Provincial museums, as well as children’s art galleries, should not drag out a miserable existence; they should receive full state support.
A special issue is the pay of museum workers and, therefore, of the gallery’s teachers. This problem greatly worries both Orlova and all her 25 subordinates.
“It is shameful to say, but the average salary in our team is only 400–500 rubles,” says Elena Vladimirovna Orlova, nervously crumpling a handkerchief. “Does anyone need to be told that this amount is three times lower than the subsistence minimum? And each of our female employees has children who want to eat and need to be clothed and shod.”
It is no secret that in our country those in power, citing the difficulties of the transition period, finance culture, including children’s culture, according to the so-called residual principle, believing that young citizens can wait painlessly, for themselves and for society, for the development of their talents — wait for better times. This is a very dangerous delusion, for even our ancient ancestors proved the justice of a simple truth: if a gifted child is not helped in time to develop his or her abilities, that talent will be irretrievably lost to society.
Intelligent leaders who feel responsibility before their voters sometimes understand this and decide to shoulder, at the expense of regional budgets, tasks belonging to the federal centre, creating non-standard centres of culture locally. Honour and praise to them for that. In the Volgograd region in particular, the team of the current governor has laid a reliable foundation for the development of culture in the form of the Regional Children’s Philharmonic, the Regional Children’s Art Gallery and the Regional Children’s Experimental Musical Theatre.
One would think Moscow officials should rejoice at such initiative and try to help new shoots grow in the Russian provinces. But no. The principle kicks in: we did not ask them to create original children’s structures locally, and since they did it, let them finance them themselves. Is this a state-minded approach? Are there really so many talents in our country that we can leave children’s creativity to chance? Any civilised country in the world would pay Orlova and her associates huge sums for the work they are essentially doing in Russia for free!
And peripheral museums are in such neglect that one can only wonder how they survive at all in our difficult time.
Parliamentary Gazette / No. 31 (910), February 12, 2002
Valery ZHURAVLEV, staff correspondent, Volgograd.
