Holiday Painting

Roman Romulen or Rakhmatulin (born 1986 in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad) was raised in a military family that frequently moved. He spent his childhood in the steppes of Kazakhstan by the Baikonur cosmodrome next to the launch sites of Soviet spacecraft, to which his first works were dedicated. In the 90s, his family moved to Moscow, where he graduated from the Architectural College and Moscow Architectural Institute. After a career in architecture and interior design, Roman devoted himself entirely to painting in 2011. Roman considers himself a citizen of the world. Roman’s travels took him across Russia, India, Europe, Great Britain, and the United States. During each trip he creates art that conveys not only what he sees, but also his feelings at the moment, the energy of places, events, and situations. He makes six-month art residency trips to New York in 2013 and 2016, where he lives, works, creates new canvases, communicates with American artists and citizens, does solo and group exhibitions. Roman's work is the quintessence of several directions in art, both in technique and in content: the artist's initial gravitation towards an impressionistic manner, pure colors, and a dynamic composition was later enriched with the energy of non-objective art styles of New York, superimposed on the academic basis of classical architectural drawing, which Roman studied at the university. The artist describes his life as a constant flow of light, color, images, emotions, places, and events that resonate in his canvases: be it memorable journeys across the world or the adoption of a puppy from a shelter (this puppy has since become a part of the artist's creative language in the Blue Dog series). Roman’s paintings are in private collections in Australia, India, Italy, China, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, USA, France, South Korea, and Japan. In 2020, the artist's works were accepted into the collection of the State Art Museum of the city of Tula, one of the largest in the country, where such masters of the past as V.V. Kandinsky, K.S. Malevich, K.S. Petrov-Vodkin, I.K. Aivazovsky,. I. Shishkin, I. I. Levitan, V. A. Serov, K.A. Korovin, B.M. Kustodiev, Klaes Molenaer, Jacob Duck.