In his first solo exhibition in 1969, Michail Ščigol presented tempera paintings of a smallish format. They originated during his student travels (1968 - 1969) around "Great Russia". The artist captures architecture in the open air and individual points of the landscape, and as early as that reveals his feelings about what he saw (for example the building of a monastery, which became the first Leninist exterminating camp for the crushed intellectual elite). His most recent cycle of paintings dating from 1997 is a return to the time of his childhood, to the holiday stays in Odessa and its sand beaches. It is the artist's memories of his Uncle Theo (the architect Theodor Sharnopolsky), whose ability to express himself by original drawing constituted the ground of Michail's later career. The world of children - the twins Michail and Viktor, and the world of the adults is marked by a generation gap: whereas the adults only "play cards", the twins explore the incredible mysteries of the coast and the sea. In this most recent cycle, entitled "The Sketchbook of Uncle Theo", the artist even used the direct citation of his uncle's original drawings of the people on the beach, after all those years thus reviving his uncle's need to depict and somewhat ironically tell the story of his days. To provide deeper authenticity, Michail Ščigol also uses photos from the family album. The twin brothers are the focus of all that is happening: they are together all the time, fighting and embracing in their children's inseparability. They "walk with elephants", are amazed at the wave rising above their heads, lean over the water to be lost in the wonders of imaginative childhood which enables them to join in the mystery of what they see underneath, which comes to life when, in his drawings, their uncle­demiurge supplies the contours with eyes and hints of the forms. The twins are the secret allies of the summer Odessa, from whose shores every now and then a ship of the beauty of their childhood takes off... The colours Ščigol uses (blue, purple, greyish, white, flashes of yellow and muted red) create the painterid dream of the evoked RETURN.

Out of the other remarkable cycles of paintings, the black and white ensemble of seventeen temperas dating from 1995 - 1996 doubtless deserves our attention. These paintings pose the fundamental question - why paint at all, why undergo that complicated process of identifying with oneself through the parameters of art laws, why search for subject­themes and realize them. The artist comes back to the fundamental motifs of modern painting: the model and the painter, the figure and the easel (Dance with a Muse, Embarrassment). The starting point of other paintings is powerfully expressive, still others are existential myths (the artist "thrown into the arena"). In fact this is a group of paintings which very poignantly expresses the substance of artistic individuality and its ability to be true in the creative sense of the word.

A moving ensemble of oils of the "fatal type" is the one entitled "The Great Cherry Robbery", which was inspired by the painter's deep affection for his son Danylo, who after a polio attack was temporarily bound to a wheelchair, and for his similarly afflicted friends from the convalescent home in Železnice near Jičín. The painting which gave the title to the whole cycle represents a tree with ripe cherries, complemented with a number of children's hands, which remind us of birds, and the empty wheelchairs under the tree, symbolizing the omnipresent sadness in the children's joy. Another painting from this cycle, entitled "A Dead Bird on the Path" which conceals the mystery of the bird's velvet death, or "The Hunt for the White Birds" which metamorphizes human souls and perhaps suggests an indirect link to the tragic death of the artist's wife in Samarkand, reveal a similarly excited sentiment told in colour and composition.

Finally, we cannot fail to mention a kind of imagination typical of this artist, namely the shifts from the anthropomorphous to the zoomorphous, expressed in the "figure of horse" or its head, or perhaps the "head within the head". The horse also represents a harbinger announcing the images of the closest beings.

The painter Michail Ščigol paints his oils without the use of preparatory sketches: usually, he first paints on a large format (up to 150×100 cm) and then elaborates on the variations of the original theme in smaller formats. His "drawing" pictures start in hints, characteristic strokes, signs and dynamic foreshortening. The verisimilitude of his works is rooted in the original transfer of the space and time of the action to the painting. When we follow these realistic procedures of figural imagination a question arises of whether the artistic contradictions of post­modernism are not in fact out of date when compared with the form of works propelled by ethical consciousness and enthusiasm - albeit lacking in ostensible innovations.

Tábor, Czech Republic, August 1997