Dmitry Tanchev, парк скульптур в Алексине Bor лесу / Sculpture park in Aleksin Bor forest

all pictures courtesy of Dmitry Tanchev

Over thirty wooden sculptures created by a self taught artist, more or less randomly spread over a forest area near a district of a city, it is rather specific phenomenon in the field of art environments in Europe 

Such a scattered art environment ¹. exists in the forest in the Bor district in the north-western area of the Russian city Aleksin (Tula region), located some 130 km south of Moscow.

 

Life and works

Dmitry Tanchev, who created this specific art environment, was born on August 6, 1975 in Aleksin, a city of some 68.000 inhabitants in the Russian region Tula. 

In the 19th and early 20th century the town was a center of forestry and metallurgy. It included wooded areas with pine trees and summer cottages (Anton Tsjechov would regularly stay there).

In the 1970s the city flourished because of the growth of the chemical industry, but in the 1990s due to the major changes in Russia (perestroika) orders were off and decay of the local economy occurred, which also was evident in the lesser maintenance of streets and parks.

Лес не помойка (The wood is not a dump)

Tanchev who grew up in these years, as a young boy already was quite interested in visual art. He could draw well, but as he became older his interest in three-dimensional art grew.

So when he was in his early thirties he began to focus on sculpture, in particular creating wooden sculptures. On the internet he had seen a video that showed someone making a wooden sculpture with a chain saw and this deeply impressed him.

 

By watching videos on the internet he taught himself how to handle a chain saw and as he said in an interview with a newspaper: "I realized that this was a business that I had been looking for all my life. Before that, I tried a lot of things, but nothing was right. And then I came to the right way of life, stopped drinking and smoking".

In order to get on with working with a chain saw, he worked for a year and a half with the unit that was engaged in the maintenance and pruning of trees in Aleksin.

 

Tanchet is a religious person. Because of his reversion and his work in the field of sculpture he feels rewarded by God. In his sculpture the religious aspect is reflected in his depictions of saints and angels.

But his sculpture also has a social dimension. By embellishing  the town's forest with sculptures its beauty is accentuated, which may increase its appreciation and might counter the pollution of the forest, a neglect that occurred. 

Tanchev began this project in 2012. The forest in the northeast of the city is a protected area of some 400 ha named Aleksin Bor with a lot of pine trees, partly over a hundred years old.

Selecting dead trees as his basic material, Tanchev began transforming these on the spot into sculptures with a variety of depictions:  holy persons, knights, indians, characters from fairytales, folk stories and comic books, but also a variety of animals, such as bears, a tiger, a lion and dragons.

He did this project entirely at his own power and with his own financial means, without any assistance from others or support from the authorities.

Within a few years he had created over thirty sculptures, located on various places in the forest, just where he found trees suitable for carving.

This did not go unnoticed. In the course of 2015 various local and regional newspapers (see documentation) reported about Tanchev's collection of sculptures in the Aleksin Bor forest..

At the end of 2015 the local newspaper Sloboda organized a contest Man of the year 2015 where Tanchev with a record of 8000 votes was chosen as the winner in the category "heroes of the people".

In addition to the sculptures for the setting in the forest, in the course of the years Tanchez has created a large number of stand alone sculptures, both large and small ones.

His oeuvre currently includes over a hundred various items.

Documentation
* Dmitry Tanchev's account on VK
* Article by Dmitri Borisov on the news site Tula.AIF.ru, July 2015
* Article by Maria Kucherov on the website of newspaper Myslo, August 2015
* Article by Tatiana Gamulina in webjournal Aleksin Vesti September 2015

Video

* Video by evgenytny (3'05", YouTube, October 2014)

notes

¹. A "scattered art environment" refers to the totality of related creations located in a rather extensive territory near the artist's living place

Dmitry Tanchev
Sculpture park in Aleksin Bor
Aleksin, Tula region, Russia
can be seen in the local forest

Beniamin Petrovich Tabakov, Decorated house

this picture and the next ones from the series

by Labiscwi on fotki.yandex

Benjamin Petrovich Tabakov, a self-taught artist who decorated his house in Staropysjminsk in the Russian region Sverdlovsk, was inspired by another self-taught artist, blacksmith Viktor Nikolaevich Volkhin, who lived in the neighbouring community of Berjozovski.

Tabakov began decorating his house in 1981. At that time Volkhin, who died in 1982, already had completed the decoration of his house.

Life and works

The biographical information about Tabakov is limited. He probably was born in the 1950s and he became a truck driver with a transport company. He married -probably in the late 1970s- and looked around in Staropysjminsk for a house to live in with his wife Augusta Dmitrievna, a house appropriate to eventually share with children and grandchildren.

That house, he thought, had to have something specific.

When he had seen Volkhin's house in Berjozovski decorated with pictures of fairy tales, he knew that something like that would be suitable for his own house. And so in 1981 he began. It would become a lifetime project.

Just as Volkhin did, he painted the facade of his house with scenes derived from familiar fairy tales and folk stories.

He also referred to scenes from a popular Russian TV-series named Ну, погоди! (Wait a minute!).

Regularly adding new scenes, Tabakov has been active in decorating his house for over 30 years.

He made photographs of all stages of the development of the facade, in black and white as it was at the time he bought the house, later on capturing each new scene in color.

From an interview with Tabakov in 2015 it appears that at that time he still was engaged in making new decorations. Meanwhile three generations live in the house and a granddaughter occasionally helps her grandfather, as the video from 2010 (below) shows.

Tabakov in 2010 

(screenprint from the 2010 video below)

Documentation

* Article (may 2015) by Maxim Gusev on the website of Strana Life

* More pictures by Labiscwi on fotki.yandex

Beniamin Petrovich Tabakov 

Decorated house 

Odinarka straat, 4, 

623718 Staropyshminsk, Sverdlovsk region, Russian Federation

can be seen from the street

Václav Rubaš, Sculpture garden

pictures courtesy of Pavel Konečný

In the outlying area of Klatovy, a town of some 22.000 inhabitants in the south-west of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Rubaš's art environment, a garden with sculptures, can be encountered: 

Life and works

Rubaš was born in 1909 in Hodéjov near Strakonice, some 50 km east of Klatovy. After primary school he became a stone mason, a job he would have until retired.

There are no reports that he during his working life somehow was engaged in making artworks, although he liked to craft things for daily use. However, in 1988 at age 79 he made a replica of the fountain in the center of Klatovy, the town where he meanwhile had settled and lived with his family 

And then in 1989 at age 80 he made his first sculpture, a creation which depicted Veles (also Volos), the Slavic God of earth, water and the underworld, often associated with cattle and herds. Especially made for his daughter, the creation was displayed in the garden of the family home.

This was the start of a period of creativity which lasted for the next six years and resulted in a production of all together 27 stone statues.

In general displayed on small pedestals, these sculptures are arranged in the garden in such a way that they face eventual visitors who enter the site.

A number of Rubaš' sculptures depict famous persons, such as Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia (from 1918 till 1935) and J.A Comenius, the Czech philosopher (1592-1670).

Other works include a Venus, busts of nymphs and various animals.

Exposition

In 1996 the art gallery At The White Unicorn in Klatovy had an exposition of Rubaš' artworks, but before it was opened, the sculptor deceased (March 21, 1996).

Actual situation

After the death of Vaclav Rubaš the family continued to live in the house and to care for the sculptures in the garden.

The site is private property and can't be visited freely. However, most of the sculptures can be seen from the street through the garden's wired fence.

Documentation
* Pavel Konečný & Šimon Kadlčák, Atlas spontánního umění (Atlas of spontaneous art), Prague, 2016 (ISBN 978-80-906599-1-9). p.14-23
* A series of pictures of the site by Pavel Konečný on Facebook (July 2015)

Vaclav Rubaš
Sculpture garden
K Letišti 515
Klatovy, Pilsen region, Czech Republic
can be seen from the street

José Miguel Padrón Morales, Sculpture garden

photographs courtesy of Julia Sisi

Ferro (or El Hierro) with its 270 km² and its around 10.500 inhabitants is a small island in the south-west of the Canary Archipelago, a group of islands in the Atlantic Ocean that belongs to Spain.

Although small, El Hierro can boast its own art environment, which can be considered as the south-westernmost site of Europe.

This is about a sculpture garden which is still in the making, created by José Miguel Padron Moralés (born in 1962).

José Miguel Padron is the owner of a tavern in Aguadara, a hamlet located in the northern mountain area of El Hierro, some 7 km west of the town of Valverde, the capital of the island.

The type of tavern he runs is locally also referred to as guachince.

In his free time Padron is engaged as an outsider artist, making characteristic sculptures from sheet metal, which he welds from discarded parts.

Before he began operating the guachince José Miguel worked at a quarry and here he finds the components of his sculptures.

 He creates man-sized sculptures which depict two-legged animals resembling birds, dragons or ostriches, but just as well four-legged life-size insects and other characteristic creatures.

They are lined up on the grounds of the tavern and the visitors of the tavern eat no bite less because of these neighbors, on the contrary, the meals get all the praise of the visitors.

  

Documentation
* Up to now the only information on the internet about this site is an album on Facebook by Julia Sisi

José Miguel Padrón Morales
Sculpture garden
38916 Carretera Casas del Monte 8B
Aguadara, Ferro (El Hierro), Canary Islands, Spain
sculptures can be seen from the road
streetview (2012)

Viktor N. Volkhin, Decorated house

pictures courtesy of Sergey Bezgodov

When decorated with wood carving in a traditional style, in general affixed by local craftsmen, old houses in the Eastern European or Russian countryside often have a wonderful artistic appeal. To be ranked as an art environment, however, the owner of the property himself should have designed and installed the decorations.

This happens just occasionally and so up to now in these countries such sites are not considered as a specific artistic expression and still get little systematic attention. But the times they are a-changing....

One of the first Russian art environments with a decorated exterior presented in this weblog (in March 2011) was the one created by Sergey Kirillov, the blacksmith of the small community of Kunara, some 70 km north of Yekaterinburg.

It seems that art environments get increasing attention in Russia 

And now, six years later, here is a post about another blacksmith who transformed the facade of his house into an art environment and who, besides, also lived near Yekaterinburg: Viktor Nikolaevich Volkhin.

A first report about this decorated house was published on the internet in 2015, followed in 2016 by a second one (see documentation). These publications might indicate that in Russia art environments are receiving increasing attention on the internet.

The house of blacksmith Volkhin

Berezovsky is a town of some 60.000 inhabitants in the Sverdlovsk region in Russia. The town is a close neighbour of Yekaterinburg, the capital of the region and with 1.3 million inhabitants the fifth city in Russia in terms of inhabitants.

Viktor N. Volkhin, about whom no biographic details are available, except that he was a blacksmith and died in 1982, left his home town a little gem by single handedly decorating the facade of his house.

A Russian newspaper reported in December 2019 that the house is currently occupied by the son of Volkhin's godson Oleg, who grew up in the house from childhood.

illustration on top of the right door of the entrance gate

referring to the story of the fisher and the fish

More about the exterior decorations

The front side of the house with its various components -a part with windows, a number of entrance doors with turrets and a double-door entrance gate-  has been embellished in many different ways, both with colorful wood carving and with equally colorful storytelling illustrations.

The typical Russian turrets above the two entrance doors rest upon pieces of tin which are painted in various colors

Both doors of the centrally located entrance gate have a middle part with wooden radiations. The upper and the lower parts of these doors are adorned with illustrations.

The one on top of the right door (picture above) probably is a referral to Pushkin's story of the fisher and the goldfish.

illustration on top of the left door of the entrance gate

The picture of the bear with a basket (on top of the left door of the entrance gate) probably refers to the tale of the girl who gets lost in the forest, ends up in the home of a bear and by a ploy is returned to the family home in a basket carried by the bear.

The picture with the cock playing the accordion probably also refers to a Russian fairytale.

The illustrations on the parts at the bottom of the doors of the entrance gate depict snowy landscapes.

The decorations on the other parts of the facade have referrals to other Russian fairy tales and to a famous Russian animated TV series named Ну, погоди! (Wait a minute!). 

The pictures published here just give a small impression of the rich totality of the decorations.

The site has a protected status

As the pictures show, the house looks well maintained. It currently is protected by the state as a monument of wooden decorated architecture. To my knowledge only the house of Sergey Kirillov has such a status in Russia.

The interior has been modernized.

Documentation
* Russian newspaper E1.ru (dec 2019) with a variety of pictures of (especially) the decorations of the house

first published April 2017, last revised March 2020

Viktor Nikolaevich Volkhin
Decorated house
Ul Vorotnikov 2
Berjozovski, Sverdlovsk region, Russia
can be seen from the street
streetview