Известный американский писатель Ральф Питерс пишет о Леониде Семейко/
Bestselling American author Ralph Peters writes about Leonid Semeiko's works:
"And I stopped cold. Good painting grips me. The artist's challenge and the intelligence officer's dilemmas are remarkably similar: Both must develop an eye for the telling detail and the ability to reduce the complexity of the world to a manageable coherence. Then both need to communicate their vision convincingly. The way in which the finest artists seemore acutely than others mirrors a top-of-the-game intelligence analyst’s ability to block out humanity’s white-noise and listen to the revealing undertones.
Ultimately, it comes down to talent, instinct, the unlearnable. Training is essential but it only takes you so far. Some men and women can paint, others can’t. Art schools make students, not artists. Similarly, no combination of graduate degrees, dedication, and hard work can make a stellar analyst of someone who wasn’t born with the right mental quirk. I learned more about intelligence work from Cézanne and Harper then I did from government manuals.
I saw brilliance on the walls of that Tbilisi shop. Among our other ambitions, Peter, Henry Nowak, our erstwhile travel comrade, and I had resolved to loot the Soviet Union of the finest art we could scavenge as our old enemy failed. But I had never seen anything on offer as fine as the paintings hanging through an archway in the room used as a gallery.
There were subtle abstracts and clever representational paintings, all unmistakably from the same hand. Big canvases of conches – photo-realist in their precision – were pungently erotic. Color experiments, disciplined and unerring, put me in mind of what Whistler might have painted had he lived at the end of the 20thcentury. The nudes on display were melancholy – reveries amid crumpled sheets, superbly human, flesh you could smell.
In our postmodern world two types of paintings are especially difficult to bring off. Abstract art – or call it by the vogue name of the moment – usually amounts to nothing more than then pretentious slopes on the walls of Manhattan galleries. Nudes are tougher still – most painted today are either purposely revolting, immature attempts at the profundity or look as if they were meant to hang above a jacuzzi in the Playboy Mansion.
Leonid Semeiko was a master of the both forms. And off others. His combination of the versatility and depth fused in a personal style as distinctive as it was disciplined. There was nothing superficial or harried about the least of his paintings, no sense of impatience or of a hustler on the con. Every work looked inevitable. I have met a few painters I thought had significant talents. But only Semeiko possessed a dash of the genius."
...
"I hope to live out my life surrounded by the paintings I stretched to buy from Leonid. Should my eyes fail, I will trace my fingers over the textures of their surface, remembering."
Extract from pp 66-68
“Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World”
by Ralph Peters
2008
ISBN-13: 978-0811706896