I was born in the virgin lands of Kazakhstan, my childhood and youth were spent in Belarus, near the Bialowieza Forest. I live and paint in Moscow.

More than a hundred paintings in the online gallery of the art community of artist art lib Elena Rylova

http://www.artlib.ru/index.php?id=11&idp=0&fp=2&uid=38898&idg=0&user_serie=0

Three dozen paintings in the private collections of my close ones: my three daughters.

Two dozen paintings in the nursing home,

Two dozen paintings in the Meeting club.

Half a hundred to a hundred paintings ready to sell. I am a priest. I need an office for the church.

How and why I started painting portraits and flowers

Elena Rylova

When I was two and a half years old, my mother and I moved from Kazakhstan to Belarus, where my grandparents lived. We settled in an old house with small windows and a low ceiling. Here I slept on a metal bed, next to my mother. When she went out on errands, I was left alone and then I carefully examined the paintings that hung on the wall, above the headboard.

For a long time and with great care, with a child's interest and curiosity, I studied them, examining every stroke and every little detail. It was a bouquet of lilacs and a portrait. One day the painting with the portrait, which hung on a nail driven into the wooden, whitewashed wall, fell to the floor and the glass broke. The painting was taken and thrown away. This made me sad, as if I had lost a close friend. But who would ask a three-year-old child?!

I remember how I dreamed of pencils, how I waited for my mother to buy them, and how I wanted to draw. Twelve colored pencils were a coveted dream for a child. My mother went to the neighboring village to the store and bought me colored pencils, and we drew an apple together. That was happiness.

By the age of four, I was registered and sent to an orphanage. My mother was mentally ill. My grandparents were elderly and in poor health. Sixty years have passed since then, and everything I absorbed as a child, in moments of solitude examining paintings, manifested in me; I began to paint portraits and flowers.

I started painting portraits in oil in 2015, when I was 54 years old, and I painted for two years; they turned out bright, original, simple, but quite similar, and my close ones liked them. I wanted to print them for myself and my relatives, like a book of oil portrait paintings. They were especially attractive in black and white printing.

The portraits mainly depict our Rylov family: grandmothers from both sides, father and mother, four children, grandchildren, and each separately from childhood to adulthood and old age. I also painted in oil my closest friends. When our granddaughter Liza was three years old, she recognized everyone I had drawn in the portraits.

Despite the lack of professional training, I attended an art circle in the Kuncevo district of Moscow, for the desire to draw was in my heart. The first time I painted in oil was in 1988; Svetlana was then 10-11 months old. She watched me, and when I left the room, she bit into a tube and painted herself brown from head to toe. She liked it very much. But I had to work hard to wash her off. However, 25 years later, she bought me paints and canvases, and I finally surrendered to the creative impulse that had lived and hidden in me for many years.

Taking care of the family, children, duty, and obligations did not allow me to sit down and draw. But when my daughter Svetlana had Liza, during the first year of her life, I often picked up a pencil and sketched pictures while my granddaughter watched the creative process attentively. She really liked it. Thus, we grew.

In the end, many paintings accumulated; I took photographs, and sometimes completely different images of the same painting turned out. I showed about twenty paintings to the professional artist Olga Rasskazova. She classified them as the genre of primitivism, wrote that the eyes were very expressive, especially in children. Later, she wrote about the later paintings: "good compositions, there is balance and dominance." Later she wrote: exhibitions can be held.

Why do I want to paint eyes so much? I once saw these eyes after anesthesia in the operating room when my soul left my body. I saw that the eyes filled the universe. They are like the all-seeing eye of God. They cleansed my conscience and saved my life. Therefore, I expressed and conveyed in paintings my revelation about the divine essence of every person through the example of my close ones and relatives.

I wanted to publish them. Thus, this first book appeared, and then others. I dedicate the book to them. I do this for the glory of God. I consider it my duty to spread it on earth. I thank God for the Ridero website, which makes this simple and possible for everyone, including me. If only there is a desire to create!