Penza, 3 September 2014. PenzaNews. The opening ceremony of the exhibition of artist Anatoly Afanasyev, timed to his 85th birth anniversary, was held in Savitsky Penza Picture Gallery on Wednesday, September 3. Overall, 109 artists’s works were included in the anniversary exhibition.

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“These are mostly paintings of the last three years, but I allowed myself to include some retrospective, because this exhibition is a kind of a report. Most of the work is watercolor, gouache and pastel. There is one acrylic picture,” Anatoly Afanasyev told news agency “PenzaNews.”

Describing his work, the artist admitted that he is the best at painting portraits.

“I love painting people, most of all friends, but sometimes I nag the people on the streets. We’ve got a lot of beautiful people, after all,” he said.

As Kirill Zastrozhniy, deputy chief of culture and archive of the Penza region, said during the opening ceremony of the exhibition, this event may be of particular interest to the young art lovers.

“Thanks to Anatoly Afanasyev’s pictures, we can experience the world of men of culture and art of the city of the past and the present. For those interested in the history of the region, there is a lot of useful information. Visitors can see the ministers of culture, singers, musicians and actors. If we look into the eyes of the people in the portraits, we see what they used to be like, and what the contemporaries are like. This is what is phenomenal about Anatoly Afanasyev,” he stressed.