Art of the Florenskaya Sisters

"... I wanted so much to forget everything and paint in oblivion. When you draw (after praying), you are connected to God and it is nice to reveal your dream on paper”.

Valentina could not get over from the loss of her husband: “I know it will be more and more difficult for me to live in this world. I’m ready to carry my cross if the Lord does not abandon me. It’s enough just to believe that it will be a light in another place, where I will see my Seriozha...", she wrote to her brother Pavel Florensky.

Despite suffering from a terminal illness one would never
see regret or anger in Raisa's eyes; vice versa, she seemed always calm and
peaceful, as if ever ready to move to the next world. She entered in the world of
art through icon-painting and later mastered painting and engraving too. She
painted with the aspiration of symbolism. Valentina was her older sister and had a huge influence on Raisa’s creativity.

In Raisa’s creativity, there might be some reflections of the Russian school representative Viktor Vasnetsov, though one of her most distinguished drawings “Fairy Roses” is an ideal mixture of symbolism and the colour palette of Klimt: like in Gustav’s “The Kiss”, the nude figure of a woman is presented with grace, her forehead illuminated with two rays as she holds a lily flower with buds - symbol of the innocence of the Mother of God.

Following her sister Valentina’s tragedy, her style changed dramatically and instead of art objects, she started to paint strange creatures, like those seen in Francisco Goya’s “Dark Drawings” series. Her art from this period of time reveals how gutted and anguished she was.

Elizabeth might not have been under the influence of Goya’s creativity, and she may not have seen the works of the Spanish painter at all, but, apparently, spiritual crisis and emotional suffering are almost identically expressed by these two artists on both paper and canvas.

We see the gibbetted bodies as much in Elizabeth’s paintings as in Goya’s “Disaster of Trouble”. In Elizabeth’s drawings, the snail devours the body of its infant just as Saturn does his son in Goya’s masterpiece.