There are many different opinions about talent – is it inherited on genetic level or not? It is undoubtedly clear that predisposition to art creative work appears and develops in favorable spiritual and life environment. Oleg and his sister Nora, so talented as a sculptor, were brought up in a family where there was an atmosphere of devotion to art. Their father who had graduated from the Stroganovsky art school, then the highest art studio (Vkhutemas), was a professional artist and a famous Moscow master of book drawings, And now Oleg has always before his eyes the youth “Self-portrait”of his father, his water colors, beautiful illustrations to “Anna Karenina”. These art works are an example of great skill and high demands to himself and to art. His mother was a talented artist, the apprentice of Lentulov and Alyakrinsky in Vkhutemas, but her creative fate was not realized. In young years Oleg's art influences were of high classic art such as Michelangelo, Titsian, Rembrandt and others, including Russian artists, such as Th. Vasilyev, I. Levitan, V. Serov and especially V. Surikov.

     It would seem that Oleg's artistic path was determined, but confluence of his father's noble blood with the jewish blood of his mother combined with very complex personality, generated evidently from an “explosive mixture” that made his life and art very complicated.  Non-conformism, impossibility and unwillingness to adapt himself to the common “rules of games” in well-being have determined the life and spiritual world of the young man. He couldn't bear the routine, the official style in school and institute, that ruled the Soviet art of that time. In spite of evident success in painting, Oleg quit the preparatory course of the Art and Industry school. It was a brave act.

    Oleg entered the All-Union Institute of Restoration. The following eight years he studied the art of temper and oil painting restoration under such masters as A. Zaitsev, V. Filatov and O. Lelekova. Famous all over the world, the Russian School of Museum Restoration meant to him reputation, high skill level and a wonderful speciality for all his life. Travels to the Russian North – to Kirillo-Belozersky, Ferapontov, Solovetsky monasteries were of great importance to him. These indelible impressions and love of nature of the northern lans, ancient Russian stone, wooden architecture and Russian icons have remained forever.

    In Russia and in Israel Oleg Sherbakov is outside of art life. He works for himself, as it's called. He doesn't take part in exhibitions, rejecting laws and the spirit of these ideological and commercial “markets”that humiliate the dignity of art. The artist chose his own way and treads it with the heavy cross of artistic solitude.

   Already in early youth the sphere of artistic interests of Oleg Sherbakov was determined: these were art and poetry. He is looking for answers to very burning questions of modern life in historical fate of Russian nature, moral and philosophical problems of religion, art and literature. Love to native land, Russian culture and Russian nature, not only natural and intuitive, but conscious is maturing and strengthening in him. Moving to Israel in 1976 denoted the drastic change of life and artistic situation. And restoration again gives Oleg an opportunity to save his spiritual, artistic and economic independence. He worked for fifteen years in the restoration art shops of Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv Museums of Fine Arts. His highly complicated and sophisticated work such as restoration of antique statue of Adrian or the picture of M. Gotlib “Doomsday” became real events in history of Israeli restoration. In 1991 O. Sherbakov left museums and from that time on has been combining restoration with intensive and fruitful work in art, drawing and poetry.

    Oleg Sherbakov has not so many paint works.The date of the earliest of preserved still lives is 1963: red drapery, a bottle, tubes of paints. “With such works one can finish but not start the studies”, - said one of venerable Moscow painters about this still life. One more still life, the first one in Israel: light color, onions, a wooden mug. And another one, that has been painted further in dark color: drapery, two apples and ancient books, one of which is opened on a hebrew text. Taking into account all high skill of realization in these still lives there are some traits of study works with compulsory tasks for training vision and exactness of the subjects' reproduction, strict discipline of drawing, volume modelling, color unity and texture of painting. But we can see in them some features that are peculiar to Oleg Sherbakov: clear ideas, self-discipline and concentration of artistic and skillful efforts, inadmissibility of any approximately,  negligence and incompleteness, attention to the technique and technology of painting.

    The image system of picture becomes more sophisticated in other works of Oleg Sherbakov: expressive and analytical “Self-portrait” (1984), complicated compositions that have combined the genre of still life with elements of portait and landscape. The main features of artist's individual manner are the same, but according to the new tasks, the skill of painting is growing, the expressive means, compositions and the most important thing – content of these original and peculiar art works, are enriching.

 

    In the “Still life with a red scorpion” (1988) behind the drapery, a jar, some ancient volumes and an album of Russian icons we can see the black surface with the portrait of Vladimir Visotsky and the view of Kirillo-Belozersky monastery on it. These images are imitating black and white tone photos. The songs of Visotsky and his poetry, full of extreme sincerity, piercing pain for Russia and her people won the heart of Oleg as long as in the Sixties and from that time on this topic runs throughout all his art.

    In another still life of an album and paint brushes the artist also uses the technique of “collage”, but now we can see the photos of Oleg's father and mother and also Varlaan Shamalov, whose fate and books symbolize the historical tragedy of Russia. The images of V. Visotsky and V. Shalamov, impressions, observations and contemplations of the artist that are united in the hearth of his life and creative experience, are realized in drawing of Oleg Sherbakov. These drawing are artistic, historical and human documents of great power.

 

   Oleg Sherbakov as an artist has one very important thing that pushes – voluntarily or involuntarily – all the rest aside to the background. He has a main theme and a distinguished artistic creation. The fate of Russia has become to him this theme – several triptychs that are made in the technique of pencil drawing are the creation of it. This technique doesn't diminish O.Sherbakov as a painter; we speak about the scale of values in the sphere of his creative work in which he has been able to express himself and his attitude in full measure.

    He left Russia twenty years ago and all these years the country where he was born, matured and became a personality and an artist, has remained with him. This is not a nostalgia of emigration, forced or voluntary, when the past seems to be an irretrievable loss covered by deceptive haze of illusions. No, it is a permanent feeling of vital participation in Russia, her people and nature, great and terrible historical fate. It does not disappear even for a moment; it exists with him and in him and with time pain doesn't diminish, but it becomes more acute and piercing. Perhaps, everything or at least partially it could have been quite different, if the artist could accept his new country. But that hasn't occurred. Oleg has a nature of one-love man; nobody and nothing can fore Russia out of his heart. Brought up in traditions of Russian culture, he can't accept the atmosphere of conformism and heartless, triumphant banality, cult of material welfare, venality of politicians, medieval obscurantism, insult of artist's and art's dignity in milestones of artistic market. Some may say that such an impression is one-sided, partial, subjective. Yes, but it is the real feeling of the artist who cannot accept any emollient semitones. This is his vision of the real world. The heart of the matter is that Oleg Sherbakov is not less, even more severe and uncompromising regarding Russia. His demanding and exacting, passionate and at the same time sober, without any kind of self-deception love for motherland does not leave any place for illusions and delusions. By spiritual vision that has become sharper in time and space, he sees clearly and exactly light and shadows of Russia, her greatness and fall, her rotting splashed out by so called “reconstruction” (“perestroyka”) and publicity (“glasnost”). People exhausted and corrupted by totalitarianism, serfdom, cruel repressions and concentration camps, are humiliated and insulted, and this profaned, outraged Russia that is criminal and corrupted, lying and spiteful, ruined through excessive drinking and sold, he hates with the same passion and force. Hatred and Love, Love and Hatred are inseparably linked and it is hardly possible to separate one from another. They exist in paradoxical and mutually penetrating unity. “Russia. The Roaring Voice”is the name of one triptych. In the center there is the dome of Nadvratny church of Kirillo-Belozersky monastery with the statue of archangel Gabriel with a trumpet on top of it. On this background we can see portraits of two old women and one old man; on the left there is one more old woman, on the right – either a man or a prisoner in a cap with ear-flaps and a quilted jacket. This quilted jacket is a uniform of Russian peasents, worker, prisoners. Their three-dimensional, very plastic faces produce strong impression. These sharp wrinkles, cheek-bones under sunken cheeks, overworked sinewy hands, deeply sunken light eyes which stare at us and inside are the images of people's suffering and torment and at the same time fortitude of soul, inviolability of moral principles on which Russia has been standing since the beginning of its existence. These are not faces but images of martyrs in whom we hear the roaring voice of Russia. The particular aspect of this theme appears in dedication to Varlaam Shalamov that is drawn on the right. Varlaam Shalamov is a prisoner and a writer whose “Stories of Kolyma” determine a new scale in an art cognition of Russia in the XX century. And here we can see the lines from “A Word about Igor's regiment” that connect historical being with the present day:

 

    “We drowned in three waters,

      We bathed in three bloods,

      We boiled in three lyes,

      We are the purest”.

 

    Purification through suffering, a thorny way to the Temple, that is passing through blood and incalculable torments...

The main theme of “The Roaring Voice” returns us to the triptych “The Temple” (1990-1991) that was drawn earlier. We see wide open rusted church gates, the ruins of a temple behind them. This temple is ruined, abandoned, dirty. But high above, as a mirage or a sign of eternal hope we can see a tower of a hip-roofed church. This vision that appears before a man in the gates has something in common with the fragments of majestic Kremlin Catherdral and Spassky Tower that appears in the right side of the triptych. The profound idea of the triptych is developed in its thematic and imaginative structure: the man has turned to spectator of the bald back of the head, his hand convulsively, with  enormous tension is reaching for a piece for rye bread on a wooden table, on the right we see the same prisoner in a cap with ear-flaps and a quilted jacket with whitish unseeing eyes. This gesture of craving for our daily bread, this rough featured and humiliation of all human traits in human beings. Where is the salvation?.. In white-stone temples, churches and cathedrals on blood, in those invisible temples that a human being creates and saves in his own soul? Again and again the artist asks the question that was asked by the best minds of Russia, and his voice sounds with despair and pain as a voice of a man crying in the wilderness.

    “Mercy” (1990) – by this word Oleg Sherbakov has defined an imaginative thought for one more triptych that has been dedicated to the memory of Nora, his beloved sister. At the first sight this triptych shows simple genre scene from the Russian life. In the center there is a northern village – we see a street, log cabins, fences, trees... and a carpenter, a cripple with one arm, is planning the cover of a coffin; near him there is an old woman and a boy with a loaf of bread. The mournful tune is suddenly broken by two young country men on  a bench with vodka and glasses in their hands and impertinent grins on their faces. Opposition of mercy and charity from one hand and full moral atrophy from the other hand is more clean in the right side of the triptych. Outskirts of the town, ragged ruined houses, disgusting rats are directly on a pavement – this is a sign of terrible running wild. And again we see two drunkards that have lost their human face. They follow with their eyes a barefoot man with a coffin on his shoulder suspiciously and spitefully. We see two different dimensions that can't be coincided: the world of moral and physical rotting, degradation, disintegration of a human personality and a world of soul purity and nobleness, compassion and mercy to the people. On the left side of the triptych we see the most terrible thing that one can imagine – cripples with stumps of arms, exhausted and sick, and these cripples are children. The children of Russia, the children of the era of wars against strangers and no strangers, the era of concentration camps of nazism and stalinism, the era of sinister signs of starvation and epidemics, Catastrophe and Chernobyl. Further on we can see the walls of Solovetsky monastery, a Russian sacred place, that was defiled blasphemously and changed into notoriously known SLON – Solovetsky concentration camps of special designation, one of the “islands” of “Archipelag Gulag”. A crucifixion in the center of the triptych, Solovetsky cloister on the left, “Righteous man” (as we call him) in the outskirts of Moscow and the portrait of Vladimir Visotsky who is striking the bell to awaken the conscience of Russia – bring in another intonation and transfer the artistic narration to another level. The everyday routine raises to the level of the historical being of the country, and through the horror of its real tragedy, hope for salvation makes its way. And as the grain of rebirth is hidden in death and rotting, so in Love-Hatred there is a glimmer of hope. By his internal spiritual insight the artist is again and again persistently, with some kind of obsession, returning to the historical fate of Russia, her past, present and future. The creative act becomes the returning journey to a native land, evidently not a material one, but metaphysical and speculative, thrilling and tangible. Overcoming extensive narrative features of “The Temple”, rejecting some kind of illustratively, plurality of characters, details, the artist turns to philosophical and symbolical interpretation of imaginative thought and in the same time to very personal and lyrical expression, to laconism of expressive means. The light in the darkness, the light at the end of the tunnel – the main idea of his work can be expresses in such a way. In impenetrable darkness something dazzlingly white appears, we see a naked man in a circle that is formed by a striking ray of heaven's light. Exhausted to collapse, struck by convulsion of unbearable pain, he is trying to straighten up, to regain his human dignity, the dignity of a humiliated outcast to non-existence personality. Who is he? - Resurrected from the dead in the Doomsday, in the day of Our Savior's advent, the symbol of people that are turning to spiritual and physical rebirth, a sign of suffering and after it will atonement come?..

    The artist does not give a mono-semantic answer, but only indicates it by the name of the work: “Resurrection. Pain of return”. The salvation of people that are now on the verge of disappearance is possible only by means of agonizing purification from powerful Evil, finding faith in the Creator of the Universe, salvation by force of Good. The bearer of Good in this triptych is the image of Kirillo-Belozersky monastery: the artist links faith in the future revival of Russia with love for its history and culture, for its nature, because the pledge of eternal existence of the Russian land and the Russian people lies in the charm of her modest beauty. On the right we see the Russian North and the same Kirillo-Belozersky monastery, on the left there are fields and coppices of Moscow region. It reminds us of the verse of Alexander Blok:

 

  “Russia, pauper, Russia,

  for me thy grey izbas,

  thy windy songs,

  like first tears of Love”

     

 

    Suffering creates Love, Love in turn, creates hope, and hope gives force to survive. “And the impossible becomes possible now...” Will the return be realized, will the Resurrection be realized? Life is going on, the questions remain..

    Every triptych discussed is an independent complete work of art, but in total they are represented as parts of one graphic narration. The unity of graphic cycle is based, first of all, on chief ideas and integrity of artistic self-consciousness, purity and unity of graphic system. Rejecting decidedly aesthetics (exactly speaking “anti-aesthetics”) of modernism, Oleg Sherbakov is true to the classic of the world and native art, Russian realistic school that is guided in its turn by absolute professionalism and academic methods of drawing. A paradox of artistic situation is that the artist uses this system not for self-satisfying illusory things and not in the direction of doleful naturalistic likelihood, but for expression of very far, as a rule, from life vision imaginative and plastic ideas, that are realized in the sphere of modern aesthetic, social, individual consciousness, historical, philosophical and theological categories, symbolical way of artistic thought. The artist doesn't spare neither time nor work for the smallest detail, but these details are united in whole integrity of artistic image. For instance, in “The Moscow region”, one of the highest achievements of O. Sherbakov as a landscape painter, every furrow, every leaf or “craquelure” of rind are represented in focus of stereoscopic, acute, due to unusual transparence of atmosphere, vision. This is not a vision of a nature “copyist” but of an artist, who can see in particular and transient distinctive things marks of general, eternal ones.

 

    Genuine things can endure comparison with great ones. Time will be an arbiter and pronounce its irrefutable verdict. We can't anticipate the judgement of those who come after him. But one thing is obvious: Oleg Sherbakov us a genuine artist, and even if truth is unachievable, then the uneasy and thorny way of philosophical and imaginative comprehension, chosen by him, is very fruitful. For it is said: “Keep on seeking, and you will find” (Matthew 7/7).