The featured painting was created by a painter, graphic artist, illustrator Nikolai Sazhin. In order to understand this work better, we need to look into the artist’s biography. Nikolai Sazhin was born in 1948 in Troitsk, Chelyabinsk district. At the age of 11 he moved to Vyborg with his parents. Later he continued his education at the Taurian Art College and the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. The painter himself noted that these were the impressions of his childhood spent at the provincial city that stimulated his imagination. Afterwards 6 years at the Academy of Arts followed. For the artist these were 11 years of art discovering and working on his own style. He was into Pavel Filonov’s and Mikhail Vrubel’s art. The works’ complexity and multivariance were important for Sazhin. He qualified himself as an artist from the ‘thinking’ category. It is possible that Filonov’s influence made a contribution to the artist’s establishment. He divided the objective world and its depiction on the canvas. Destroying the materia, he was opening its beauty and core. His works, having the classical school of painting as a base, are tightly bound with modernity by nature.
The artistic language is recognizable with the exotic symbiosis of the floral and physiological forms. The painting ‘Her Imperial Majesty Catherine II…’ by its form resembles the coat of arms of Russian Empire, but it is wholly filled with implications. The portrayal similarity gives place to the content. For the artist Catherine is the light and the sun giving life and structuring the space around it, which gave the start to the whole chain of the rulers, Russian political life and its historical path.
Sazhin’s paintings stand out with their special color palette. They have inky and dove-colored tones. With such background the bright golden-yellow medallions become the main characters of the painting. For Sazhin the fantasy focus of the work, the symbiosis of the real and the imaginary was of great importance. The artist gives a viewer an opportunity to guess the mystery of the concept not explaining and opening its content.
