The only time I posted about a painter, it was in Philippe Charles Jacquet: The Better Maestro of Solitude, where I also mentioned Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Hopper as being on my short list. This time, I want to introduce you to a contemporary artist living in the US: Evgeni Gordiets (Ukr. Євген Якович Гордієць).

As a language note: the traditional Ukrainian transliteration of Євген used to be Yevheniy, inspired by the traditional Russian transliteration of Евгений into Yevgeniy or Yevgeny; the more recent Ukrainian transliteration in official documents seems to be Yevgen, whereas the Russian name goes Evgeny; so Evgeni looks like an even more latinized (romanized) version of the Russian Evgeny. Why not Eugene, then?

Either way, this is what I noticed on Facebook, at a lower quality, and which made me try finding more about Evgeni Gordiets:

Blue leopard and fish

Wikipedia dixit: “Eugene Gordiets is known as a surrealist artist. He writes in genres of landscape and still life. His work is compared with the works of the French artists Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and René Magritte.” (Oh, Eugene, toldya.)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes? Bullshit! René Magritte, yes, to some extent. But also a bit of Giorgio de Chirico, maybe a bit of Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier Rousseau), and others (Georges Seurat, as some works are more pointillistic than others).

Gordiets has a website I suggest you to visit. You’ll find there quite a lot, except that the site is a mess, at least when I visited it. The Full Collection… is not the full collection! It only displays 133 works of the Land and Sea collection. Should you explore the collections, you’ll find: Land and Sea (133 works), Still Life (43 works), Women (29 works), Fish (15 works), Abstract Design (37 works), Sold and Archived (106 works), for a total of 363 works. And yet, I wasn’t able to find the blue leopard!

But then, should you click on View archived works, you’d get 13 works. At the top of the resulting page, there are further links, including All (also Non-paginated): 352 works! The previous count is probably wrong, with a few works included in two categories, hence counted twice.

Either way, I saved the digitization of those 352 paintings for my private offline pleasure. Let me teach you how to get the full-size version of any such picture.

Say you’re into our Blue Leopard and Fish. The displayed picture is this one:

https://images.artfulcloud.com/48288_2033567w1200+v=202401151316c202401151316/blue-leopard-and-fish-34x38.jpg

To get the full-size version, change it as follows:

https://images.artfulcloud.com/48288_2033567/blue-leopard-and-fish-34x38.jpg

Some images are larger, even more than 4,000 pixels large.

I hope you realized what you have to do. I did it for 352 pictures in an automated way, but I had to find a trick, as the website refused any connection from wget and curl, even when changing the user agent. I had to use WFDownloaderApp with delays between crawls, and some Python.

You’ll find below a quick selection from Evgeni’s website. I avoided the purely abstract ones, as well as the still life. I included a couple of pointillistic ones, and even from this sample, I guess one can notice the recurrent themes: Mediterranean-like landscapes, shapes of women in the rocks, peacocks, apples, fish, and the very specific way of representing the trees, the women, the houses. Now you tell me which painters have influenced пан Гордієць (or is it пана Гордієця?).