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I remember myself, though hazily and somewhat from the outside, when I was two years old. I spent my childhood in an ancient village of Hilcha (Hulcha, Holcha) mentioned in the letters of the XVI century. The village is famous for its St. Nicolas healing water-spring; the ships of the Russian Empire used to be blessed with its water. The miracle happens here on Epiphany – the water sparkles, gleams and waves back into the grot, it then becomes dark after people’s Twelfthtide bathe. When I was three years old, I started to scissor out different figures from newspapers and stick them to the windowpanes. I also put small roads on our cold floor and, as my mother says, I often fell asleep on them, as I stayed alone at home because there was no kindergarten at that time. Later I started to draw soldiers and entire armies. I cut them out with scissors and my friends and I fought a mimic battle. I had a plenty of those armies and presented them to the folks. I always painted something in my childhood - there were wars on those drawings all the time. They all perished in fire in the basement of our “Khruschev-era” apartment in Rivne. My mother went there to take out some home canning and left a candle on the old coffer. Later I started to paint landscapes in watercolors – my imagination was always fancy. I painted everywhere. I remember as once I was sitting in the Viennese armchair in the granny’s house and looking at the oil paintings on the window – there was a river, a tree, a forest and deer. I did not like those deer at all. The hawkers used to carry such drawings in the villages Properly speaking, those deer were a start of my art knowledge. In my fourteenth, I began to master oil painting on my own. I painted on cloths stretched on the handmade frames and on the box cardboards; I drew on everything, which was good for this business. At first, I did not size the canvas. Two paintings of that “era” survived. Most of all I like watercolors. The technique is complicated and momentary. If you “mispaint “, everything is lost then. There came many museums around the world and Great Masters in the process of time. There were favorite books, experiments by the yard, never-ending sketching from nature and a search for oneself. The latter is the most difficult as it lasts the whole life of yours. I call my style Abstraction of Reality. Everything I do is Abstraction of reality. Yuriy Oleksandrovych Nagulko, an honored art worker, graduated from Ukrainian University of Hydraulic Engineers. His first exhibition took place in 1989. Since that time, the artist presented twenty-seven one-person shows. His works are kept in the private collections of Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Sweden, USA and others. The annual one-man exhibitions present only new artworks of the painter. His family consists of his wife, Olena Leonidivna, and two sons – Vlad and Rodion. “He got an art education on his own having studied nearly all books on anatomy, composite structures, perspectives, paint chemistry and art history. Art critics O.Rogotchenko and B.Rudenko consider the artwork of Yuriy Nagulko a phenomenon. He skillfully composes his paintings enriching them with the emotion of extreme harmony being the only exclusive importance…” (B.Rudenko in Painters of Ukraine Encyclopedia). A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones. Credo Abstraction of Reality is a distillation of an event and episode that is important for a small or big quantity of people. It is an attempt to understand morals and ethics of the existence during a long period of time, the ethics that is concentrated in one flash and shot. These are interrelations pronounced through love and hatred; they are often diametrically opposite but natural, being of no pretence and pomposity. It is knowledge of spiritual life in the light of infinity of life manifested in the art of the past, in the religion and philosophy of the generations. It is not just an echo of everyday life, though very horrible, that is concentrated in wars and catastrophes.
Abstraction of Reality is an endeavor to walk along a thread that connects an ancient man and a contemporary. Interrelations of God and people, importance of spirituality and high morals, collision of Light and Darkness are eternal questions being repeated from century to century. Beauty and ugliness in interattraction and repulsion create the single world which is so diverse and strives to no harmony. Revival of spirit with lines and paints seems to be the only possible stylistics for such a task; this is the world of no idealization and it requires no correcting or amendments – it is a dominant of love and sympathy. It is more like a romantic music than a cacophony of a modern city. The multi-storey art has a corridor leading to the Light full of passion and freedom and requiring thorough meditation, comparison and discussion to learn a mission and purpose of the human life. All this is impossible without deep knowledge of painting technique, history, philosophy and psychology. Such painting is a rather complicated and dangerous tool that has to be treated with the utmost care.
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