An amazing person and talented artist Gleb Andreevich Kovalenko has been living in Irkutsk for more than fifty years. A native of Leningrad, who survived all the horrors of the siege of his native city, he entered the Leningrad Art School in the victorious 1945.
Freaky teacher
In the second year, a new teacher came to their painting department. The older man who spoke with a great accent was Franz Geberling. The artist who moved from Konigsberg gathered around him a group of the most talented students, whom he not only taught painting techniques, but also demanded that young artists sit in front of their drawings for a long time, doing meditation, or, as he said, "saturating the spirit of a material object with energy."
One day he told the students a story that at first many took for a clever invention of an old eccentric.
According to Geberling, at the beginning of the 20th century, one artist - a friend of Geberling - bought a small painting by an unknown artist at an auction in Dresden. This picture was of no particular artistic value, since it was executed mediocre and did not differ in the originality of the plot - a young shepherdess stood on a poisonous green meadow surrounded by snow-white sheep. However, its new owner was struck by the face of the girl depicted on it. Cold, deathly pale, it strikingly attracted the eyes of this already mature person. The first strange thing that happened after this acquisition was that his wife did not like the picture. She demanded that the artist not hang the canvas with other paintings, but place it in his office. Geberling's friend complied with his wife's request. And soon very unpleasant things began to happen. So,a few days later, a portrait of his wife, painted by the artist himself, fell from the wall and was damaged so much that it could not be restored. In the artist's studio, canvases began to tear, paints disappear, brushes deteriorate. The owner of the house began to understand: something was wrong, when suddenly his beloved wife suddenly fell ill and soon died.
For several months the artist did not find a place for himself. And once, looking at the only painting of a pale-faced shepherdess that remained in the house, he was surprised to see that the previously bright colors faded, and the outlines of the girl's face became blurred. Then he attributed it to the poor-quality writing technique of the anonymous author of the painting.
Some time passed, and the artist married a second time. A young girl from a wealthy family who found herself in a house she did not belong to became depressed. And once she announced to the artist that she was afraid of the picture hanging in the office. The girl from the canvas seems to wink at her viciously. The artist reassured his wife as best he could, went into his office and was stunned. Again the colors in the picture became bright, the green of the meadow acquired a poisonous screaming shade, and the shepherdess's face seemed to look younger …
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Soon the second wife of Geberling's friend hanged herself. The desperate artist considered the purchased painting to be the culprit of all his troubles and burned the canvas. Although, as if, shortly before his death, just before the war, he saw her again in one of the exhibition salons in Germany …
Portrait of an old woman
After graduating from an art school, Kovalenko leaves for Irkutsk for the romance of the Siberian expanses. The artist travels a lot, paints in the Transbaikal and Sayan Mountains, in the Altai and in the Arctic. Once in one of the most beautiful corners of Lake Baikal - the village of Listvyanka - Gleb Andreevich accidentally meets an ancient old woman who was considered a witch.
Glancing with her half-blind eyes at the paintings of Kovalenko, the elderly woman said that it was just right for him to paint icons. Such is the power and grace in them. And then she invited the artist to draw her portrait, saying that he would help many more in life.
This picture was given to Gleb Andreyevich surprisingly easily and was completed pretty soon. Kovalenko took his job to Irkutsk, and after a while the prophetic words of the old woman began to come true.
Once a good friend came to Gleb Andreyevich from a taiga Yakut village. Tom had to undergo examination in one of the clinics for a brain tumor. Irkutsk doctors confirmed the disappointing diagnosis, and the man began to prepare for a dangerous operation. Once, returning from the hospital, a friend stayed overnight at Gleb Andreevich's, and waking up early in the morning, told Kovalenko about the amazing vision that had happened to him. In the middle of the night, the man woke up in the room assigned to him with the frightening feeling that someone was staring at him. He opened his eyes and saw that on the opposite wall hung a portrait of an old woman, illuminated by the bright moonlight. The guest began to think that in front of him was the face of a living person, who in the next second would step to his bed. Those expressive green eyes literally mesmerized him. The first feeling of fear quickly passed, the man began to feel drowsy, and soon he did not notice how he fell asleep.
On none of the following nights did the guest see anything like it again. True, during this time the headaches that had tormented him over the past months stopped. When he went to the clinic for a preoperative examination, the doctors did not find a tumor in him.
In subsequent years, the portrait of the old woman did a good service to many more people. It was enough for a person to spend the night in the room where the picture hung, how he miraculously recovered from his ailments, and everyday troubles passed by themselves.
Once thieves got into the artist's apartment and from everything that was in it, they stole only a magical portrait. However, less than three days later they rang at Gleb Andreyevich's door. He opened it and saw the stolen painting lying on the landing.
Scary order
In the early nineties, a strange client turned to Kovalenko. Without identifying himself, he asked to draw a portrait of his wife from a photograph. But the most unusual thing was that Gleb Andreevich had to paint the portrait with paints that the client brought with him. The amount offered for the work and the advance payment were quite satisfactory for the artist. Promising that the portrait would be ready in a month and a half, Kovalenko set to work. However, as soon as Gleb Andreevich took up the portrait, he began to overcome the painful feeling that he was doing something disgusting and terrible. The work progressed more and more slowly every day. Moreover, soon the artist's strength began to leave. It seemed that in those hours that Kovalenko stood behind the canvas, life flowed out of him drop by drop.
Gleb Andreevich told his friend a psychic about his frightening state, who, having barely seen the outline of the painting, said that the artist should immediately leave this work, destroy the canvas, and return the paints to the owner. It was in them that the whole problem was. The psychic said that in this paint he sees human blood, cemetery soil and the ashes of paper on which a terrible curse was written. If this portrait were created and ended up in the house where the client's wife lived, then this unfortunate woman would very soon die. Apparently, in this way the unknown client decided to get rid of his annoying wife and not incur criminal punishment for this.
The colors of the unknown guest turned out to be the murder weapon
When the customer appeared at the agreed time and found out that the painting was not ready, he was furious. Leaving, he promised to deal with Gleb Andreevich. However, he did not fulfill his threat …
Today, in his work, Gleb Andreevich adheres to strict rules. He believes that one should never draw sick or dead people, corpses of animals. Their negative energy will negatively affect the owner of the picture. But mountain or water landscapes are beneficial to people. Pictures of the forest bring prosperity to the house. However, here, too, one should carefully approach what is depicted on the canvas. Aspen, ash and poplar trees are oppressive, and in no case should they be kept in bedrooms.
More than a hundred of his works are kept in Kovalenko's apartment. Another three and a half hundred are scattered across museums, exhibition halls and private collections in Siberia. And each of them, according to the author, has its own character and its own unique soul.
Source: Secrets of the XX century, №41, October 2009, Sergey KOZHUSHKO