Anatoly
Tikhonovich Selutin

Soviet painter, improvisational artist.
He was born in 1937 in Ukraine at the mine "Shakhta7/8", Krasnoluchsky district, Voroshilovgrad region (now the territory of the Lugansk People's Republic). In 1938 his parents voluntarily and forcibly left for the Far East, where the mines were being opened. In the first class after the war the boy went to Primorsky Krai and Sakhalin, where he had to complete the whole course of "village sciences", even herding cows. No one taught him to draw. But Anatoly's father often went on business trips to Moscow, where he always visited the Tretyakov Gallery and brought his son postcards, and Tolya meticulously redrew them, because he loved to draw. It so happened that Anatoly entered Khabarovsk music school in the class of choral singing and began to work. And then fate brought him together with architect Victor Bezyazykov, who brought Anatoly to the local art museum. He was 22 years old when he saw the originals for the first time in his life. Anatoly immediately bought paints and began to write. Three years later, the budding artist moved from the Far East to Rostov-on-Don. And here in the life of Anatoly Selutin appears a real painter, who became for him both a teacher and a friend. It was Peter Stepanovich Keller. It was then that Anatoly realized what painting was. One day Keller told him: "Do not give up painting, it is given to you by nature, from God". And he was not going to quit - on the contrary, he decided to professional education, having entered the Art and Graphic Department of the Pedagogical Institute in Moscow at the age of 38. When he enrolled, teachers asked him what art school or art school he had graduated from - they did not believe that he had never studied anywhere before the institute. He by no means felt himself to be an "old believer" in the institute, although by that time he had accumulated considerable artistic experience. After all, few of the then students were lucky enough to visit the Repin Academic Dacha in the Tver region. Here in this wonderful place Selyutin was lucky to work next to the venerable artists. There, on Akademichka, he took a boat and went far, far away to the Kuindzhi Islands and wrote self-consciously, a lot. For drawing he went to an extraordinary teacher Peter Bendel, who never painted in oil - only in pencil and watercolor. Having defended his diploma, Selutin continued to write landscapes, traveled a lot... He graduated from the Faculty of Art and Graphic Arts of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. All his life he traveled, moving from region to region, from city to city, taught both music and drawing. And all the time he wrote landscapes, subtle and absolutely sincere in their simplicity... He lives in Istra, Moscow region. Anatoly Selyutin, artist-improviser, artist-peacemaker, singer of the beauty of our homeland. Selutin has a very characteristic easily recognizable paste brushstroke, and therefore in each canvas you can feel a certain "music of nature", its wave-like dynamics. And the artist himself is still in constant motion, travels around the country and writes new landscapes of his favorite places. For 60 years of creative life Anatoly Selutin created hundreds of paintings, many of which are represented in Russian museums of the country, in particular, in the museum of the New Jerusalem Monastery in the Moscow region, Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery in the Vologda region, Holy Protection Monastery in Korsakov. His solo exhibitions have taken place both in Russia and abroad (City Hall Gallery in Hamilton). His works were also presented at exhibitions in Poland and Germany. But Selutin himself considers the most important in his life the exhibition "Worship the Holy Place", dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the birth of Patriarch Nikon, reformer of the Russian Orthodox Church and founder of the New Jerusalem Monastery, which was held in June 2005 in the Istra Museum. More than 250 of his works were presented there.