Sergei Nikolaevich Andriyaka is a talented Soviet artist, teacher, television presenter.
He was born in 1958 in Moscow, in the family of a teacher of the art school at the Surikov Institute. Sergei began drawing at the age of six, and at the age of eight he enrolled in the school where his father taught.
In 1976 he successfully entered the Surikov Institute, which he graduated in 1982 with a painting "On the Kulikovo field. Eternal Memory.
However, the wide popularity of the young painter was brought by the picture "New Year's Eve" (1984) - one of the saddest, piercing and deepest canvases, painted in the USSR.
It is impossible to look at this stunning picture indifferently.
The plot of "New Year's Eve" is laconic and harsh. We see a huge cemetery on the outskirts of a big city. It is New Year's Eve, snowing, and freezing. The cemetery is completely empty and quiet. People are there, in the distance, in the twinkling lights of high-rise buildings, among which stands and decorated with toys and tinsel a huge Christmas tree.
In the middle of a quiet cemetery, a hunched-over old woman with a stick sits alone on a snow-covered bench. Only the light from two candles - one in the old woman's hand, the other stuck in the snow - illuminate the cemetery's only visitor.
The old woman sits beside a grave stone, on which is a portrait of a young girl, her last name, first name and patronymic. It is obvious that the stone is on the grave of the old woman's daughter. The mother came to visit her child on New Year's Eve.
And brought with her what the girl loved so much - a Christmas tree. A small, neat Christmas tree, carefully decorated with toys and shiny "rain," looks so strange surrounded by cold stones.
The cemetery... It looks like the strangest, quietest town in the world. The deliberately huge slabs look like skyscrapers. They almost obscure the city of the living from the viewer. The artist seems to tell the viewer: all people are mortal, and dead people on our planet a thousand times more than alive. Memento mori.
But this painting, of course, is not so much about the fact that life and fun - transient, but about love. About the eternal, infinite, holy love of a mother.
A mother sits on a bench, snow is falling. Her hunched shoulders, her kerchief already whitened, but she sits, sits, sits... She doesn't seem to want to leave anymore...
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