Biography

German Travnikov born in 1937 in Mekhonskoye village, Kurgan region.

Entered Sverdlovsk Art School in 1956. After finishing Art School moved to Kurgan for permanent residence.

Since 1964 participated in art exhibitions and joined the Union of Artists in 1967.

His first one-man show was held in Kurgan in 1970 and there were about twenty one-man shows in total - in Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk, Tyumen and Moscow, in towns of Poland.

Also participated in more then one hundred -allunion, republican and international exhibitions.

In 1982 the title of Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation was conferred on him.

His works are represented in the funds of many museums and picture galleries of Russia, in the funds of state museums of Poland and Bulgaria, in galleries and private collections of other countries.

Artist’s notes:

"Travelling is like a festival. It takes us up above routine and vain, widens our knowledge, makes acquaintances with other people, with a foreign culture, gives a feeling of complicity with the great world, lets us look at our land from another side, so to say, see its unique peculiarity and beauty more acutely.

From all the genres of fine arts the landscape is closer to music. There is no melody without the landscape. The main in the language is the sky, even if there is none in the picture it will echo on Earth in every dew drop, a stone or a blade of grass. The sky, state always gives a unique melody of love, sorrow and space.

Watercolours, for many of us, still stay a technique of little studying, insufficient understanding and appreciation. But it seems very important to me to understand the expressive possibilities of water colour painting, the inimitability of its pictorial language. Hitherto in no one work I have managed to speak out my mind with desirable completeness. However I distinctly see that not with the help of technical shifts but only in the emo¬tional experience, in the work of soul, the inimitable artistic image is born.

And only then, easily and quite naturally, as if by themselves, in har¬monic unity, the style, manner and method appear.

I work in different techniques but watercolours seem to be the most sympathetic and sensitive to the motions of human heart. I believe that iust watercolours will help me to express what I appreciate in art — truth and beauty."