A beautiful, harmonious world, full of the bright colours of youth, a world where one hears cheerful and romantic music - this is the universe of the young artist Boris Kuznetsov.
     Boris Kuznetsov was born in 1985 in the Novosibirsk Region of Russia. He has been fond of music since he was five, and at the age of 15 graduated from the violin department of the Music School. Boris moved to St. Petersburg in 2002 and now he is in his third year at the M. P. Mussorgsky Music College. In the Kuznetsov family there are three boys and a girl, and all four children are talented musicians. Together they founded a musical quartet “AMFIR”, which has performed on the stage of the Hermitage Theatre, in the Catherine and Sheremetev Palaces, in the Derzhavin Museum, in the Prince Golitsyn Memorial Library, in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and in other concert halls of the city.
     However, it was not only a love for music which awoke in Boris in childhood, but also a passion for painting. First he drew with a pencil and painted with gouache like all children, but at the age of 14 he had already created his first painting in oil. Boris can truly be called a self-taught artist. He hasn’t had any special artistic education, and has only taken a few lessons from a well-known painter. Although talented, Boris believes his calling is not for painting but for music; “music is my profession and painting is a hobby”, he asserts.
     “All kinds of art supplement each other, art is indivisible, there are only different forms of it: painting, music, theatre…,” Boris continues. The aim of all art is the same – to influence a person’s soul, to awaken thoughts and feelings. “I aspire to the harmony of the world”, Boris says. “I want to present happiness to people and to convey inspiration through my paintings, so that the viewer can become kinder.”
     To Boris painting is first of all a form of self-expression. The young artist doesn’t make paintings to order. He spends all day in the music college, from 7am to sometimes 10 pm, and so he can only draw at the weekends. Kuznetsov lives in Pavlovsk, a suburb of St. Petersburg that is famous for its magical park, and it is there, among nature, that he gets his inspiration. After strolling along the alleys and paths of the Pavlovsk Park, he comes home and creates his “kind paintings”. Boris’s favourite genre is the landscape, and lately his passion has become the sea and the mountains. Boris himself hasn’t been to the mountains but people who see his canvases recognize specific mountains and wonder how the young artist knows what real mountains look like… Boris usually doesn’t paint from life, but draws from his mind and includes his own imaginative ideas.
     When he was asked if he used music to create his paintings, Boris answered: no. However he admitted that he must go into a special state of mind before starting drawing. “You must be in a good mood and have a peaceful mind. You must love the whole world! Only in such state of spirit one can create something worth-while,” Boris says.
     So far Boris has painted about 50 paintings, some of which are kept in private collections in Russia - in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Novosibirsk - as well as in Finland and New Zealand.