The museum-workshop of Martsenyuk

“The history of the opening of this museum … – it, of course, shows you the way I learned to cut.

On this occasion, I visited the exhibition hall in Vologda, where two drawings by Gianna Tutunjan were presented among the many pictures and various paintings and canvases.

The drawings were quite simple, comprising just a few lines. One showed a grandmother with huge, heavy hands, and the other showed a man lying under a tractor. If you say that I was surprised, amazed, or delighted – it was not so. I just ran out of the room; I was literally carried away!

I bought Gianna’s album, came home, and within four or five days I had painted my first grandmother, with huge hands and a mournful face, suffering for all the Russian land. Gianna and God helped me to create this. So, I became a master. Soon the album was not enough – I put almost all of Gianna’s drawings to the boards. Then there were other Vologda artists – Sergeev, Edemsky, Vikulov… So, the miracle, which I did not expect to see, happened – my museum was born!

The museum-workshop of Martsenyuk is a private gallery that contains three-dimensional paintings, made by the master from wood. The museum also presents carved furniture: chests of drawers, sofas, carved salaries, icons, and many wall and floor clocks, reminding us of the quiet ringing of time that in this place seems to have stopped, and the human memory.

The master can talk about his work for a long time, plunging into the forgotten world of former Russian villages with the difficult life of ordinary people and our mother Earth. On one board, as he calls the canvases, is a boy who leads his horse through a field of dandelions. On the other, an alarmed bell sounds – Russia is entering a civil war. On the third – a quiet measured life… There are also a lot of grandmothers who survived the war and the blockade, who baked pies for us and their granddaughters, and who still live in their old homes…

Most of all, the master likes to depict hands – by them you can read what kind of life a person lived, and whether it was long and difficult… There are also many boards with poems, written by him, in the workshop. The hall gives you an opportunity to plunge into thought, and your heart is filled with different feelings”.

“Let every person who enters make his heart warmer!”