The life and creative work of Yazep Drozdovich, a natural genius artist from Belorussia

Yazep Drozdovich (1888–1954) is the most outstanding person of the first wave of XX century cultural renaissance in Belorussia. Drozdovich was at once a writer, a poet, an ethnographer, a sculptor, a philosopher, a palm reader, an archaeologist, a theatric personage, an amateur astronomer, but most of all he was famous as a painter. His favourite methods of painting were ornamentation of a paper sheet, scrupulous depicting of details, accuracy in drawing and hatching. Some of his works are made in a more dynamic manner, expressively, with the use of shading and a contrast of black and white colours. The most interesting and the brightest period of his creative work was a “cosmic” one. Drozdovich appeared to be the founder of the cosmic theme in Belorussian art. Nobody else had ever painted space so realistically before.