Painting Sorrow, artist Leonid Shatsylo

• Artist: Leonid Shatsylo
• Title: "Sorrow"
• Year: 2019
• Size: 90 × 90 cm
• Materials: coarse canvas (burlap), oil
• Original hand-painted painting

Sorrow is a square composition built on the rhythm of vertical forms. Almost the entire canvas is filled with elongated, slightly curved silhouettes with pointed tops standing in a tight row, like a procession or a group of figures in long hooded robes. Some forms are taller and stand forward, others are partly hidden behind their neighbours, creating a sense of depth and closeness. At the top their peaks stand out against a dark, almost black sky, while at the bottom all the forms rest on a shared fiery orange plane.

The work is painted in oil on coarse canvas — burlap — and the large weave of the support shows clearly through the paint layer. This texture gives the surface roughness and vibration, especially noticeable where the paint is applied thinly or rubbed back. The forms are generalised and almost sculptural: the artist models them with colour as volume, one side of each silhouette lit, the other sunk in deep shadow. The manner combines symbolic generalisation with the language of modernist painting and comes close to abstraction.

The palette is intensely focused: red, scarlet, vermilion and orange pass into burgundy, brown and nearly black shadows. The dark blue background at the top of the canvas creates a tense contrast with the blazing forms. The result is a dual mood — the warmth and fire of the colour merge with anxiety and concentrated silence, while the repeated bowed silhouettes evoke a shared grief, as the title suggests. At the same time every viewer may see something of their own in the work: flames, rocks or silent wanderers.

Leonid Shatsylo, known by the artistic pseudonym Leo Adam, studied at the M. B. Grekov Odesa State Art College, where he specialised in sculpture and graduated in 1986. Today he creates sculptures in bronze, wood and ceramic clay and also paints in oil, expressing deep human experiences and spiritual themes through form and colour.

The square 90 × 90 cm format makes the painting a strong focal point of an interior. It will fit naturally into a spacious living room, study, library, hall or office, especially on a light or concrete wall next to furniture of dark wood, metal and natural materials. The work will appeal to admirers of symbolic and philosophical painting and makes a substantial gift for a man, a collector or a business partner who values art with meaning.