Vladimir Semensky was born in a place called Imantau. A beautiful name for one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It’s a small village in Northern Kazakhstan. Nature appears here in its most stunning, extravagant form, it seems as if it had called down all its forces from the different parts of the flat and endless steppe, and in the place where all of them collided, a miracle happened: first, a lake appeared out of nowhere, surrounded by mountains, then there were giant pines and cliffs, but all of a sudden the extraordinary, excessive forces of nature bent the mighty trees and the massive boulders started melting and finally froze down.
These are things not related to art, and yet very important, because they let you feel the movement of the moving stream of life. This is precisely the feeling the makes a kid want to draw: he hears or senses the beats, pulsations and rhythms of this world in movement. Much later he will realize that his desire to draw is a response to this sensation, but for now he’s just trying to talk back to this feeling of life the overwhelms him, to support life by granting to it something that he can do himself as a living human being. Each child feels that the world is beautiful and that this beauty exists for him. He dares to respond to the world, thus taking the responsibility for what this world will be like. But he realizes it much later and when it happens he becomes an artist, or a musician or painter. And he becomes an adult.
That’s how Semensky started drawing.
When he was in the fifth grade at school he started attending lessons in an art studio and after graduating from secondary school, he moved to the Urals, more precisely to the Sverdlovsk region, and studied at the arts school in the town Krasnoturyinsk.
In 1992 Vladimir’s dream came true and he got admitted to the Saint-Petersburg Academy of Arts. But very soon his enthusiasm about being a student of such a prestigious school gave way to disenchantment. The Academy taught its students to draw and paint, but it also taught them that being an artist means drawing and painting the way you are taught in the Academy.
In 1995 Semensky moved to Moscow, but very quickly left the Russian capital for Switzerland and the following year he went on a long trip. He lived in Nepal, India and Thailand. From 2005 he lives between Moscow and the Crimean city of Sevastopol, where in the Phiolent cape the artists have their own village with a incredible atmosphere that you probably won’t find in Moscow or Saint-Petersburg any longer. The place attracts artists and musicians from different towns who come to take part in an exhibition or a concert, to shoot a film, to make a performance. Every day is full of events.
Semensky loves the Crimean light that turns human bodies into massive sculptures and erases the distinction between stone and flesh. Or, to be even more precise, looses something that merges all forms of life, brings together different substances, and this “something” is the movement: human gestures, the inner motion that makes flowers grow, the moves of shadows and rays that form the visibilities of the world. His paintings are like an attempt to capture the movement of the living bodies. That’s why he likes painting children so much: children convey the movement of life.
