Vladimir Tomilovsky
His mother – Maria Tomilovskaya, whose maiden name was Marie Pitz-Noirot – was born in Paris and went to Russia as a French language teacher.
Due to dislocations of the military missions, the family had to move a lot so Vladimir Tomilovsky spent his early years in the city of Ulan-Ude in Siberia.
After graduation from the military school in 1917, Vladimir Tomilovsky started his service in the engineering division of the Admiral Kolchak’s army; however, his life took a sharp turn when he entered the Red Army in 1919 and served there up till 1924 leaving the military service with the rank of Chief of Staff at the 14th cavalry squadron of the special purpose division.
During the war period Tomilovsky produced a number of posters and drawings in the local newspapers in order to support the anti-fascist movement.
They are also part of some private collections around the world: in Irkutsk, Moscow, Saint-Petersburg (Russia), Almaty (Kazakhstan), Paris (France), Athens (Greece), Ashkelon, Ashdod (Israel), Zurich (Switzerland), London (UK), Brno (Czech Republic).
His paintings were exhibited in Russia and abroad: in Germany, Japan, Mongolia and US,[2] as well as sold on auction sales such as Christie’s in the UK.
Vladimir Tomilovsky knew Baikal very well: for years he had been walking along its shores, sailed it a number of times and always paid great attention to the water of the lake in his painting that capture hundreds of its shades.
This new inspiration was a major turn in the artist’s creative style as Tomilovsky decided that such pieces of art should not be ‘painted’ but rather ‘constructed’ as the industrial developments themselves.
It was the new style of Tomilovsky’s paintings which aimed to depict the grandeur and scale of the Soviet construction projects of the second half of the 20th century.
One can find these reflections in the works like ‘The Great Martian God’, where Tomilovsky depicted the supernatural forces, the universal mind, and the planet of Earth at its origin.
An Irkutsk-based writer Larisa Lankina wrote in one of her articles that ‘the planet of Earth in Tomilovsky’s art resembles a fragile Christmas ball seen by the artist from the emptiness of the outer worlds; and it becomes the symbol of the human responsibility for its future’.
At the opening of one of the exhibitions, an Irkutsk-based art critic Paletskaya nicknamed Tomilovsky ‘the worshipper of the sun’, which was immediately picked up by some of his colleagues.
He answered this question as follows: ‘In order to evaluate a creative path of an artist, understand his or her soul, one could organise an exhibition consisting of five paintings.
