An Ugly End to a Delightful Watercolor Show

It was a rotten way to end the best art show of the summer.


As artist Sergei Andriyaka tells it, Stanislav Karakash, director of the Manezh Exhibition Hall, stormed around the place Friday ripping down the posters that announce the painter's vast, delightful display of watercolors there.


The director said the dates were wrong. The exhibit would be closing on Aug. 15, not Aug. 21 as advertised, because of impending repairs to the building.


"We are shocked and upset," Andriyaka said Monday, "especially since so many people have been coming to see the exhibit. People have been asking, 'Where can we go now to see your paintings?' There is no question that the director knows that the show is supposed to last until Aug. 21."


"I don't know what the problem is," Karakash countered. "The contract says that the exhibit runs from the 15th to the 15th. Today is the 15th, so the exhibit is over."


Regardless, the Manezh was crowded Monday afternoon. A group of French tourists were led by a guide through the show, which comprised about 700 oils, engravings, and above all, watercolors that Andriyaka has painted over the past 10 years. Andriyaka has a great eye for light and detail that make his pictures -- whether they depict Oxford, Bruges or a muddy Russian village -- compelling and easy to look at. Monday, however, unexpectedly became the last chance for Muscovites to see the collection.


It's a pity.


In a previous life, Andriyaka was probably English. Not only is he a master of watercolors, the most English of painting styles, but he is obsessed with the countryside near Oxford and is scheduled to have an exhibit there in the fall.


The artist says that his time in Britain -- he spent two months there at the end of last year -- had a huge effect on his themes and technique. For instance, he has moved away from landscapes and summery C?zanne-style villages and started painting palace interiors and abstract still lifes.


"The English," Andriyaka says, "know how to save and protect watercolors. They understand them."


Andriyaka, 35, was born in Moscow and has traveled extensively in Europe, sometimes on a shoestring, and sometimes as the guest of rich art patrons in Britain. Strangely enough, the artist's avid affection for all things English does not extend to commerce: Part of the reason that his current exhibit is so big is that he doesn't like to sell his works.


"If an artist sells everything," he says, "then he has nothing left. I sell as much as I need to survive, but I do not want to make a business out of my art."


There is no lack of offers, mind you, from private collectors, but he prefers to sell to museums, or to people who give the public access to their collections. And Andriyaka is more concerned with producing than selling. Prolific is not an adequate word to describe his work habits; manic is more like it.


"I have been known to work 24 hours straight," he relates. "When I traveled by train in Europe, I used to sketch the landscapes as they rolled by."


That was an aberration, though, because sketching plays almost no role in Andriyaka's work. Unlike most watercolorists, he does not use pencil traces to guide his brushstrokes. Not only that, you would never find him camped in front of an easel in the middle of a field or on a street corner, because he paints everything from memory in his Moscow studio. Even the scenes of Stamford, England and the Cambridge Canal were done here after his trip.


As a result, he often takes poetic license, which helps, rather than hurts, his paintings. One picture, showing the skyline of L--beck in northern Germany, has a fine, late-afternoon light that reflects off the facades of the houses and churches. The water in the harbor is barely rippled and mirrors the compact town. One of the reasons the skyline is so compact, it turns out, is because Andriyaka bunched the churches and spires closer together than they actually are. He also added a few sailboats in the foreground to give the painting a more medieval feel.


Andriyaka's paintings of Europe are like that. Fine, moody, and clearly from another century. You would never see a bus or a moped rolling down Andriyaka's version of the streets of Bern.


He has an even surer hand, however, when he paints Russia. His winter pictures of monasteries, birch trees fringed with snow, and muddy villages at dusk are not typical sentimental fare, but serious studies in light and color. They often have the more substantial texture of oils, which is an impressive feat with thin, watery paints.


Many of Andriyaka's pictures already hang in museums in the Moscow area, and he has developed a following. Margarita Potselovkina and a group of her colleagues at the Hall of Records in Pavlovsky Posad, outside Moscow, came especially to see the show.


"The pictures are light and sincere," Potselovkina said after seeing the exhibit. "We do our best never to miss any of his exhibits."