17. The old mill [1972]

In terms of its subject, stylistic features and a peculiar manner of applying the painterly smear in band-like spots, the painting "The Old Mill" is characteristic of the second period of Zlatyu Boyadzhiev's work, and more specifically of his paintings from the 1970s. Zlatyu Georgiev Boyadzhiev was born in 1903 in the village of Brezovo. He died in 1976 in Plovdiv. He graduated from the "Painting" specialty at the Academy of Arts under prof. Tseno Todorov in 1932. He painted in the genres of figurative composition, portrait and landscape. Two main periods can be clearly distinguished in his work - until 1951, when due to a serious illness he temporarily suspended his work, and after 1953, when he began to paint with his left hand. The world of the village, working life, national holidays and rituals, folklore and customs are the main themes in the artist's work. Staged and symptomatic of the artist's first creative period are the pastoral scenes, imbued with a deep respect for rural life, filled with a classical finish of form influenced by the Northern Renaissance. In the second period, the artist enriches the content side of his work and developes his amazing imagination. The primal force of reality enters his paintings, colored and mixed with the bizarre, the fantastic and the paradoxical. During his mature creative period, which was particularly fruitful, the artist created many works charged with dramatic power and expression, which attract with their unusual vision, with their strange metaphorical or grotesque images, loaded with symbolic meaning and a sense of humor. The composition "The Old Mill" presents all these qualities of Zlatyu Boyadzhiev's mature painting. The composition develops along the vertical axis, placed in the elongated format of the canvas. The figures have their backs to us. They climb steep stone steps with their load to reach the windmill to grind the grain. Others exit and continue on their way into the distance. The movement in the composition is directed upwards, which, however, sounds quite natural and lawfully in this fantastical world of pictorial space. With its inimitable and unique character, the art of Zlatyu Boyadzhiev is among the most original and significant phenomena in Bulgarian art of the 20th century. (S.N.)

Dimensions

width 24 cm, height 96 cm

Description

oil on canvas, signed and dated bottom right, in black, "Златю Бояджиев, 1972'

Dating

1972

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