Monument to Belarussian Artist Jazep Drazdovich

The fate of this artist is truly hard and sometimes even tragic. His contemporaries did not understand him; he spent almost all his life in poverty without a wife and children. However, it is not surprising. History knows many examples when people who had the most progressive views, more often suffered for them than were recognized. It happened with Jazep Drozdovich, whose world view and researches outstripped his time much. The future artist was born in the late XIX century, in 1888, in the small but very picturesque village Punki of the Vitebsk region. The family was noble, but very poor: his mother was left alone with six children. But despite this she could give her younger son desired art education, which Jazep received at the Vilnius School of Painting named after Professor I. Trutnev. The first works of Drozdovich were created under the influence of his passion for Art Nouveau. It was seen in book illustrations, his work was on the cover of "The First Belarusian Calendar for 1910" (the edition of "Nasha Niva"). Besides, he designed the collection of poems by Constance Buylo called "Stone Flower". The painter gained inspiration from the native nature, creating multiple drawings of the Disna land. During the First World War he worked as a paramedic, in peacetime he taught girls of the Higher Female School to painting, worked as an Illustrator in various printing houses and as a decorative artist. He showed his worth in the field of Ethnography, and in scientific researches. He was considered to be strange, eccentric, as long before the first space flight he directed his eyes to the sky. He believed that very soon people would be able to leave the earth and meet with aliens. He dedicated a series of his paintings to this: "Life on the Saturn", "Life on the Mars" and "Life on the Moon."   “The eternal wanderer” The sculpture commemorating Jazep Drozdovich was created by the talented sculptor I. Golubev and the architect V. Maruhin. It's called "The Eternal Wanderer", and really he was a wanderer, a leading scientist and a gifted artist who was not recognized during his lifetime. The monument not only fully embodies a portrait likeness of the artist, but also shows his world view. The sculpture presents the figure of a running man with a staff in his hands and an easel over his shoulder. There is a tree with a very unusual crown next to it. The whole "Belarusian space" is seen in its leaves and branches, planets are growing near fairy-tale castles and knights... It is a wonderful monument to the extraordinary man, which you can see with your own eyes, visiting Minsk.