Boris Kolev

Boris Stoyanov Kolev was born on 3 July 1906 in Kyustendil, Bulgaria. He graduated from the Bulgarian National Academy of Art in Sofia, Bulgaria, specialising in Painting under Prof. Tseno Todorov (1932). Specialised in art history in Vienna, Austria, under Prof. Zaloziesky (1943-44). One of the founders of the Society of New Artists; member of the Painting section of the Union of Bulgarian Artists since its foundation.

In the fine arts, the work of Prof Boris Kolev is little known and studied. It was first written about the artist in the 1930s. The first reviews are associated with his first solo exhibition in Sofia, Bulgaria, in October 1934. Thereafter, each of his subsequent shows was noted in the press. His development as an artist was followed by the great masters of the brush - Vladimir Dimitrov - Maistora / The Master, Kirill Tsonev, Vasil Stoilov, Stoyan Venev, with whom he had a close friendship and co-operation.

Today in his studio, on the easel on which he painted, there is a self-portrait of him in a hat and with an "eternal" pipe in his mouth against a landscape. His paintings, sketchbooks with drawings, books that he wrote and that he read and reread are also arranged in folders here. During his life, Professor Boris Kolev held fifteen solo exhibitions, participated in general art exhibitions of the Union of Bulgarian Artists and the Society of New Artists. He also participated in six general exhibitions of artists from his hometown Kyustendil. After his death in 1982, exhibitions of his work were opened in Kyustendil (in March 1997) and at the Orchidea / Орхидея Gallery in Sofia (in September 1999).

It should be said about the man and artist Boris Kolev that he was one of those authors who did not advertise himself. During his long creative career he painted pictures, and most of his works were done in the genre of landscape. Nature is not the weakness of one artist. In the work of Boris Kolev, it has its own image. The eye of a sensitive and observant viewer will discover the master of heavenly expanses. In most of his landscapes half of the canvas is the sky.

Already in the 1980s, being under the influence of pointillism - a trend in painting that developed the subjectivist tendencies of Impressionism - he paints the sky with great feeling and passion. For him, it is the most important element of the painting, creating the mood. Over the years, the sky attracted him more and more: he built the landscape in his own way. He always started with the sky and, until it worked out, did not move on. In 1937 he created the painting Koprivshchitsa - one of the best works of that period - with a sky in which he put his soul without words. In each of his works the sky is different, and as a colour and presence it is fantastic. He is called "the poet of the Bulgarian sky". And it is not by chance.

In Boris Kolev's life there is a curious incident that occurred during his studies, when his professor from the Academy of Arts - the great portraitist Tseno Todorov gave students summer assignments. The sky was the young artist's element, and for this assignment he painted an unusual expanse, and the professor asked him: "Kolev, where do you see such skies? Why do you begin where you should end?".

In each individual landscape Boris Kolev paints a sky that does not repeat in colour, shape or condition. Dramatic sunrises and sunsets, the sky before thunderstorms and rain create the awe that prompted the artist to paint just such a sky. Many times he told his son how in his youth, burrowing in the Kyustendil field, he observed fantastic states of the heavenly luminary. He does not like and never draws a smooth blue sky, but paints the sky with clouds of bizarre and strange shapes.

Nature also inspired the Master, his close friend and teacher, for whom Prof Boris Kolev wrote a book, published in 1955. In his memoirs about the Master, at the time when they were painting together in the great artist's native village of Shishkovtsi, Boris Kolev tells how one day the Master saw his unfinished landscape and said to him: "Master, there is already something in the sky". This assessment of one of the greatest Bulgarian artists, who found praise very difficult to give, encouraged the young artist and motivated him to work. He believes that in recreating nature one cannot reach a stereotype, and through composition and colour he makes us empathise with his attitude to it. Nature for him is a confession of the complex feelings that drive him. It is poetry through which he discovers the most mysterious corners of his soul. In his paintings he depicts mountains and forests, valleys cut through by the calm waters of the river, sometimes houses reminding of human presence, and very rarely a human figure, mainly to juxtapose it with nature and to show its grandeur.

Not only in the field of painting, but also in the field of art history, Boris Kolev directed his search in the years after his return from Vienna, Austria, where he specialised in art history with Prof. Zalozieski between 1943 and 1944. His name is also associated with the establishment and management of the Department of Drawing and Modelling at the Faculty of Architecture of the Higher Institute of Architecture and Civil Engineering (now the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy) in Sofia and with his teaching activities as a professor of this department. For students - future architects - he wrote a short course on the history of art, which was reprinted twice, the last edition in 1971. Professor Boris Kolev has also written monographs on the painters Atanas Mihov (1955), Yordan Kuvliyev (1956), the great Polish painter Jan Matejko (1971), with the monograph on the Master, published in 1955, published in five languages - Bulgarian, Russian, German, French and English. He is the author of historical essays "Bulgarian Graphics", "Russian Realistic Painting", "Great Spanish Artists", and in 1974, in co-authorship with Yonka Kotseva, he wrote a monograph on Vladimir Dimitrov - The Master. His articles on various problems of fine art and reviews of exhibitions are numerous.

*For the presentation were used materials from the "Monographic book about the artist Boris Kolev - painter, critic, professor" with the author Dochka Ivanova Kisova - Gogova, a long-time teacher at the Academy of Arts, Doctor of Art History and Fine Arts; in the leadership of the section Criticism in the Union of Bulgarian Artists.