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The Truly Surreal
World of Rinat Baibekov
Green Pebble Summer 2008 issue
It’s
like a Harry Potter story – zoom in on an ordinary English street, pull
up to an ordinary English red brick house, slip through the open doorway,
and suddenly you’re in a most extra-ordinary living room, sipping tea
with an artist of aristocratic blood whilst around you countless surrealistic
paintings glow with a mesmerizing effervescence.
The artist is Rinat Baibekov, a Tartar from the River Volga region of Russia
who arrived with his wife and family in the UK eleven years ago and who more
recently settled in Cambridge. Both his father and brother paint but, unlike
Rinat, they did not fulfill a childhood dream of leaving their homeland. Instead,
they continue to work tirelessly as artists within the changing society that
succeeded the fall of the USSR.
His father, says Rinat, virtually gives away his paintings to the State; not
because they are unvalued, quite the contrary, but because the museum curators
and art dealers cannot – and Rinat believes will not - pay the true
value of the nation’s artistic works.
Despite the restrictions imposed on artists both during and after the reign
of the Soviet Union, Rinat is confident his art education at the Fine Arts
Academy of Kharkov in the early 1980s ensured he had the best possible classical
foundation. His studies focused primarily on drawing skills and on studying
- and consequently copying - the masters. And as a student of ‘Monumental
Art’, he was introduced to architectural studies as well as to skills
which would later help pay the mortgage – creating frescos, murals,
stained glass and monuments, and restoring paintings.
But, as was to be expected of a young man who was a member of The Cooperative
of Free Artists and who played in an illegal underground rock band, not all
the requisites were welcomed. The regime placed an expectation on students
to create realistic images exulting the USSR’s leaders and the country’s
past, and Rinat’s reaction to this was to steer increasingly towards
surrealism, a style prohibited by the authorities – and thus by the
university.
‘They told me that surrealism was not “our school”,’
Rinat recalls. ‘In Russia in those times it was very difficult to speak
truths but I did my thing and this is why I had a problem with my university.’
The problem was not with the people who taught him, but with the school’s
administrators. The more he painted in his own style, the more difficult it
became for him to obtain student grants and accommodation. With the appointment
of a new Rector to his university – placed there by the KGB –
he was finally expelled, but not before he had forged strong relationships
with those faculty members who appreciated his work. A result of this tug-o-war,
Rinat remembers, was receiving private praise on the one hand and exceptionally
poor results on the other.
‘Yes, I got into trouble,’ he says with an easy-going shrug. ‘The
more they oppressed me, the more I exploded.’
He earned extra money during his university years painting official portraits
of national heroes as well as unofficial pictures of The Beatles - prohibited
Western icons. He believes he spent most of his college and university years
on the KGB’s radar.
Around the time he left university he met and married Svetlana, a manuscript
restorer employed by the Imperial Public Library Saltikova-Shedrina (now The
National Library of Russia) in St Petersburgh. Together they worked on securing
an invitation for Rinat to a Canadian art exhibition and in 1989 he left the
USSR and went directly to the Home Office in Toronto to apply for asylum.
He arrived in Canada, he says, quite literally with a small suitcase, paintings,
paints and US$325.
‘It was scary, yes, but it had been my idea to leave the country from
4 years old and it worked out.’
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