Content :

Synthesis of motives and peculiarities of the artist’s creative work in web-site construction.
(taken from Baki Urmancheh Museum web-site project)

Kazan, 2002

Yermolayev Igor Sergeevich
Chief engineer (executive)
Institute of Information Science Issues
Academy of Sciences, Tatarstan Republic


Starting web construction whatever complex it might be a web-designer or a creative teamwork is bound to face the problem of creative search of the ways the things planned could be realized.
The many-sided and profound personality of the outstanding Tatar painter, graphic artist Baki Urmancheh, whose 105th anniversary has been celebrated this year, left a deep impression on the history of professional Fine Art of Tatarstan. It exerted a great influence on the artists of the Republic that followed as well as on the artists from remote places and regions of the Soviet Union. B.Urmancheh’s life way was difficult and even dramatic at times. It ran through many provinces and places – from Moscow and Kazan to the Republics of Middle Asia, the North, and Ukraine. He left fond memories of himself in the hearts of many people, and remains to be a patriarch for many artists, having paved the way for the next generations of Tatar painters to professional Fine Art.
B.Urmancheh Museum founded in 1998 exhibits 65 original works and 150 documents and photos. The memorial part where personal things of the artist are exhibited is reconstructed, and the real atmosphere in which B.Urmancheh was making his works is rendered.
The M.F.Bugrovsky and G.I.Sadoven detached house, where Museum is situated, is a small building of red terracotta, its facade and red ornamented gates looking out on the Lyadsky garden. This is the so-called “art area”. There is the State Museum of Fine Arts, arts and drama schools, Show room of the Union of Artists of Tatarstan, Tatar Drama and Comedy Theatre, and Jalil Opera and Ballet Theatre there. The house is built at the beginning of the 20th c. (eclecticism with some elements of modern style). The house is one-storeyed on the street side and has a small garret. Back stone porch leads to two inhabited floors. The yard, very typical of Kazan, is chamber and compact and itself disposes to meditation of the fate of the city and its famous townsfolk.
Besides the general and specific information about the Museum, life and activity of the outstanding cultural worker the web-site of Baki Urmancheh Museum has a strong esthetical and ethical charge. The personality of the artist and sculptor Baki Urmancheh, profound and many-sided, constantly attracts attention of people investigating his creative work, his admirers, all those who know a little of his biography, who had seen or heard his works, who knows of his difficult life. The artist appears before us as an unusual, unique and at the same time natural phenomenon of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary epochs of building the new Soviet society. Philosophical side of the artist’s personality, inalienable from his activity in different art genres: painting, graphics, sculpture, literature and specific urban peculiarities of the place where the Museum is situated, the so-called “art area” were the priorities that had influenced the choice of the web-site makers.

The specificity of the task consisted in the following: the three constituents: philosophy of the artist, landscape of the area adjoining the Museum, and Museum interior were to be realized in virtual media, and the multimedia means had to solve the problem of the web-construction bearing shell.
A combination of a number of web-construction technologies was used for working out the project: Flash, HTML and others, some multimedia methods.
The main thing for the site makers was to find the art and technological means that would be adequate to the image of Urmancheh as an integral personality of an artist and a thinker. This could be seen on the site practically from the very beginning of the main lead-in till the last page studied. The color spectrum, “soft” movement of flash-components, resembling the strokes of a paint-brush on the canvas, design elements, graphic arrangement of the frames – all this even without text show us that this is a site about art and an artist.
Let us see the most interesting sections of the site. “Creative work” section includes three subsections: “Painting”, “Sculpture”, “Graphics” dedicated to the most important works of Baki Urmancheh. There one can see the works revealing art aspirations and peculiarities of Baki Urmancheh creative work. They had been undergoing evolution in different periods of his life, but the zenith that the artist achieved in that or another genres still stayed. So this section shows Urmancheh as a real artist and master.
The characteristic feature of the site is correlation of motives, dominating in creative activity of the master and possibility of deepening and prolonging this line up to the modern art, which is also represented on the site. For this purpose “Exposition” section is included in the site’s content. There will be exhibited the works of the artists, whose view of the world is in tune with the art of Baki Urmancheh, with his efforts directed at care of history, achievements of culture of the East and West.
“Gallery” section includes the works that are being exhibited at the Museum now. In the Museum we grasp the work of the person who had expressed the best of the creative spirit of his people, his esthetical aspirations and craving for perfection, the person who was preaching freedom in creative activity and individual self-expression. The white reigns in the interior of the Museum. There isn’t much furniture there. The exhibits are shown in an easy and unimportunate manner, there is little designing but for the wooden stairs leading to the garret, which resembles a minbar of a mosque. The suite of rooms with astonishing combination of space and chamber creates the feeling of coziness and exquisite simplicity of the museum’s appearance. This predetermined the arranging of “Gallery” section and miniscenario in this part of the web-site.
“News” section has its own ideology. First of all, it tells the news of the Museum. Besides, there are some pieces of cultural news of the city, always given from the point of esthetical and ethical aspirations. There is a possibility of reflecting events, coming as well as past, i.e. the section includes an archive. From the very beginning of the work of the web-site there appeared a tendency of making reports directly from the place the events – exhibition openings and conferences - take place.
Having a small area, the Museum is carrying out an intensive excursion activity, especially for schoolchildren and students. So it was only natural to use this circumstance for transforming the content into the world infomedia – internet, so the web-site is represented in three languages: Russian, Tatar and English.
The musical pieces by Salikh Saidashev, an outstanding Soviet Tatar composer, Baki Urmancheh’s contemporary, which are used in flash-lead-ins, are accompanied by the poems of Baki Urmancheh.
Flash design is based practically on the works of the master and the motives are taken from his works. The creative task that the designers of the web-site had set: combining the verbal and audiovisual information and its transforming with the help of a high-tech method fully answered the creative work of the artist, the image of the Museum, bearing his name. It was important to find balance between the possibilities, hidden in modern web-construction technologies and the complex nature of the theme in order to create in web a integral idea of the image of the artist, person and thinker.
Study of the materials concerning life and creative work of Baki Urmancheh, his works, visits to the exhibitions, seminars and conferences taking place in Kazan in 2002 helped the creative teamwork to find the form that embodied the quintessence of the planned project.