I really value the work of Kubarev. And it is not by chance. I have every reason for this. Kubarev is one of the few artists who had another specialty. He was a cinema artist. Nevertheless, he always returned to the origins of art, to what is called fine arts. And in particular to painting. He loved it so much. And he did his best to put the most intimate feelings into his wonderful studies.

[...] I would like to say that we really miss good painting. We are just yearning for it. I am tired of this pretense we always see nowadays. There is so much of it and of such poor quality! This is a great outlet for those who want to hide their helplessness and ineptitude. Even Picasso used to say that he was not interested in searches but in discoveries. Unfortunately, it must be stated that searches are many and discoveries are few. And this is typical of our time.

Speaking of true quality painting, we really have not seen good paintings at exhibitions for a long time. One can feel quality painting as delicious food. The works of Kubarev are just like that. His studies show the understanding and knowledge of plein air. You feel the presence of air, the influence of the environment, the influence of the sky, reflected lights, the understanding of warm and cold, as well as the understanding of tone, in his studies. All that makes the painting strong. That is the essence of the painting. [...]

We met. He was a charming man. He, as they say now, radiated a magnificent aura. He was quick to smile. I think that this was his essence: benevolence, abundance of positive emotions. These qualities are reflected in all his work, and in his painting, too. It is good in every way. It is beautiful in every way.

There is another quality inherent in Kubarev. In one of the letters to his sister, Mikhail Vrubel wrote, “I know an artist who puts the right color in the right place. (It would seem that, well, what else is required from an artist?) “But", continues Vrubel, "this is not enough yet. We still need a sense of delight. I have a sense of delight. Malyavin has it. But Malyavin has less refinement than I do.” I think we will forgive this maximalism of Vrubel. Vyacheslav Kubarev definitely had a sense of delight. Each of his studies is properly composed, painted with delight, communicating the environment [...] and air, filled with that quality of color and the culture of painting which we have long forgotten.

Vyacheslav Kubarev was a very modest person. To the highest degree. But as an artist he was very sophisticated. There is something in his works that allows one to say: he is both a Russian and Belarusian artist at the same time. He saw Belarus in his own way and expressed his view. He worked a lot in the movie industry. However, he was a landscape painter by the grace of nature. He felt the beauty of the landscape, its spirit, its attitude so subtly. Kubarev's landscape conveys a figurative view: it incorporates both figures and objectivity.

He is very interesting as an artist. His works are very humane. They have always been like this: myself and my perception of nature, myself and my view. It seemed to me that my own [artistic] vision was of the same kind. And it had always been a source of interest to artists.

It seems to me that Vyacheslav Kubarev is being somehow unfairly forgotten. Unfairly, because his personal view, which he presented in movies and paintings, was extremely interesting. He was very inconspicuous in the chaotic company of artists. However, his personality and his works are of great importance.

In a way, Kubarev was a servant of two masters: he was a filmmaker, and we accepted him into the Union as a painter. The impact of his work can be seen even now. Last year there was an exhibition in the Malyy Manege in Moscow from the collection acquired by the Interstate Fund for Development, Education and Art. There were [works] of many artists who were our acquaintances and friends. Those studies had never been exhibited before.

This material is so genuine it conveys some warmth from those years, from that time. It makes me very happy when someone remembers people who passed, people who at their time were not treated very kindly, who were not comforted and were underestimated. The work of Kubarev in the cinema is appreciated. This was his major field. Alas, not his painting... It has not been well studied, it has not been defined by art historians. And it is a shame.

Slava (Kubarev) mostly painted landscapes. And he had been to places where not every painter had ever been. In this regard, we have always envied the cinema artists who could all of a sudden go to Transbaikal to shoot an episode three or five minutes long. Or all of a sudden go to the Baltic States. And we valued Slava because he revealed a whole new world to us. Not everyone had been where Slava had. And he was very professional as a painter. I like artists who do not look at their art as just a way to earn money. And the saying puts it exactly right, “If you consider your profession only as means of earning a living, then you are taking someone else's place.” This is very true. And in this sense Kubarev was truly in love with painting.

I was lucky to work with Slava. I can call him by his short name because we were friends. We worked quite a lot and closely together. We worked on such complex series as The State Border and The Black Stork directed by Victor Turov. How did Vyacheslav work? We called him Slavushka and called him Kubik. The word “Kubik” represented affection, respect and love for this wonderful person.

Before starting the work on a screenplay, Slava, myself, and the cameraman Boris Olifer persuaded the director Boris Stepanov (who was not fond of travel) to go and choose the location first, and only then to sit down and write the screenplay specifically for each scene, for each frame. Here we sit, we pass through the text, and Slava holds the pieces of paper on which he draws every frame. And he created the visual concept of the scene. And we kept this concept after we visited Kulyab, Termez, and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) for The State Border. There we would “stick” to the place, and Slava would find the visual concept of that place, with absolute graphic precision. And what's remarkable, all the other crews later involved in the shooting process would understand well what to do, how to embody what he had drawn.

When we were on expeditions, no matter how early we went to the set, at eight in the morning or at seven, from the hotel windows one could see Kubik already going somewhere carrying an easel . After an hour and a half, he would come to my room with an easel and say, “Hey, Volodya, take a look - here's an oil painting... Fog, dewdrops on fir-trees. But tomorrow I will go with watercolors and try to paint the silence.”

Once he complained by telling me, “Volodya, it is so difficult to be an intellectual in the first generation... But one must do his best.” And so he did. And he succeeded. And he continued to aspire for this refinement through all his life and his work. For me, Slava is an example of a true artist with two passions - for cinema and for painting.

Vyacheslav Georgievich Kubarev, an outstanding cinema artist and a remarkable painter, the Honored Artist, became known to the world of cinema as a brilliant production designer after the success of Alpine Ballad (1965), which is the movie adaptation of Vasil Bykov's story.

By that time, Kubarev was already a member of the Painting section of the Belarusian Union of Artists (1964), and in parallel with his work in the cinema he honed his skills of an easel painter every day (according to the recollections of fellow filmmakers, almost every hour). Hundreds of studies together with hundreds of sketches for films were created in a single creative impulse.

Thanks to this permanent professional urgency (on the set, he sometimes managed to paint up to 6-7 nature studies per day) his compositional, lighting, tonal solutions for individual frames can be regarded as independent and valuable easel works.

The high graphic culture of the creators of the Soviet-era cinema masterpieces was based on the knowledge of classical principles, techniques and styles of the fine arts: of painting, sculpture, graphics. Born in the Russian village (Kochevo, Yaransk District, Kirov Region), Vyacheslav Kubarev graduated from the Gorky Art School (1957) and completed art education in Moscow at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (1963).

Following a move to Minsk, many years of fruitful creative work made the artist an integral part of the history of the Belarusian art. In addition to Alpine Ballad (1965), Vyacheslav Kubarev was the production designer of such films as Fit for the Non-Combatant Service (1968), Burning Daylight (1975), I Guarantee Life (1977), television series The State Border (1980-88), Kruglyansky Bridge (1989), The Eternal Husband (1990), Fool of a Woman (1991).

The success and huge popularity [...] of monumental motion pictures took their toll: Kubarev the painter, unfortunately, ended up in the shadow of Kubarev the production designer; nevertheless, his legacy is represented by narrative paintings, landscapes and, as already mentioned, a huge number of magnificent studies, which he painted all the time and at every place, at any spare moment. In his works, excellent coloristic qualities, artistic precision of brush strokes are combined with an exceptional compositional sharpness, perfected by the daily work on the composition of the frame for the cinema. Thanks to the shooting trips, Kubarev the landscape painter had an opportunity to see mountains and seas, forests and deserts, the nature of the North and South, to be inspired by various artistic situations and tasks.