There is a type of painter who has never received professional and systematic training and learning, and relies entirely on self-study to create, people often call them native art painters, simple painters, because most of them have their own jobs in addition to painting, so they will also call them Sunday painters.
In Russia, the most famous native art painter is Katya Medvedeva.
At the age of nearly 40, she painted her first painting, but the innocence of the painting captivated Chagall and praised her as the greatest original painter in Russia.
However, Medvedeva has also faced many humiliations, believing that she "draws like a 5-year-old child", but in fact, there are too many painters who can paint like adults, and too few painters can paint like children.
Another painter who was ridiculed for his childish paintings, Henri Rousseau, was also self-taught, and before the age of 50, he was a diligent tax collector, who began to paint after retirement, and lived a poor life, but broke the shackles of the rules of the academy and painted a fantasy, primitive, and vivid world that Picasso admired.
Unruly and self-contained are probably common features of all native art painters.
Medvedeva is no exception.
Medvedeva's paintings carry the savagery, innocence, and freedom of a child, with a "pure and open soul" that you can even read touching piety.
Because Medvedeva believed that her painting skills came from God, with this idea in mind, she often painted angels, saints, and Jesus, and every time she painted, she thanked the blessings from heaven and responded with paintings as prayers.
At first glance at Medvedeva's paintings, it is dazzling and childlike, and it is corresponding to think that Medvedeva's life is the same.
On the contrary, Medvedeva, before the age of 39, had a miserable life.
She was born in 1937 to a poor peasant family in the village of Golubino, Nova Skolski District, Belgorod Oblast. When she was not yet 10 years old, her parents died, and young Medvedeva had to enter the orphanage.
When she grew up, she became a weaver and worked as a waiter, postman, and property manager. Medvedeva, who has always lived at the bottom, has never had a fairy tale in her life, and her life is always very bitter.
But looking back on these days, Medvedeva said, "My life was tough, but it was fun. ”
She never gives up any scenery and little happiness in life, she will look at the wet mountains after the rain, to see the green created by nature, to touch the cold water flowing down the mountains.
The beauty of nature makes people shudder, and she will half-jokingly think, "Why am I not an artist?", but in fact, Medvedeva's life has never had anything to do with art.
By chance, Medvedeva met an artist painting for the first time in an art studio, and she began experimenting with picking up a paintbrush herself.
From the beginning, Medvedeva has been drawing exactly according to her own wishes, she does not seek the advice of professionals, nor does she enter the school for professional study, but only relies on her own ideas to draw an almost dreamy world in the picture.
In her works, the lines of buildings and objects are crooked, no longer regular to perfect, full of wild childishness, which makes people happy. Medvedeva also paints a large number of ballet dancers, dressed in dance suits, tiptoeing lightly, glittering in a dark background, as if touching a light dream.
This unpolished simplicity makes Medvedeva unique.
As she put it: "Thank God, I haven't learned to paint anywhere, because if I do, then no one will feel my voice, my language." ”
Although reality is not beautiful, Medvedeva heals herself in another way in her paintings.
Even after much suffering, Medvedeva's heart has never been dusted, it is still clear and carefree, and perhaps the colorful happiness in the painting is to make up for the regret of her childhood.
The painting is like a key that opens Medvedeva's soul.
She was immediately recognized when she painted her first painting. She then switched from watercolor to oil painting, creating hundreds of works and appearing in several solo and group exhibitions, being acquired by numerous museums and private collectors in Russia and abroad.
In 1982, a collector bought Medvedeva's painting and brought it to Chagall, who looked at it appreciatively and said, "She loves color too, just like me."
It can be said that painting changed Medvedeva's fate.
She went from being a property manager to a sought-after artist, and her work was welcomed around the world, with one exhibition after another.
But she herself seemed as if nothing had changed.
After becoming famous, Medvedeva's life became complicated, and she suffered a lot of questions and discussions. But Medvedeva did not care, the jealousy of the weak only pushed the strong, and she was born not to be weak.
Although she is naturally strong, more often than not, Medvedeva is open-minded and optimistic.
Medvedeva says she was the happiest artist of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Because she paints every picture, she is bathed in happiness.
She said: "When you paint, you can't think about money, because when you paint, it's like you're talking to God.
In her view, children should not be "taught" to draw, only technology and skills are taught, and painting is self-pleasing and sharing happiness, when the teacher teaches, he only imposes his own preferences on the child, and replication appears.
After becoming famous, Medvedeva still lives in the small countryside of Russia, loves to drink, but because of her healthy relationship, she is suffering from abstinence from alcohol, like an ordinary old lady next to us.
But she still draws like a child, like the first time she picked up a paintbrush at the age of 40, painting the world in her heart, not being disturbed by the outside world.
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