Suvorov Aleksandr V. was born and lived in the village of Volnoga, the Tver region. He came from a peasant family, his mother died early. He went to school for one year only. He took apprenticeship from a local cobbler. He learned to work with a knife. He worked first on a collective farm, then on the railway. He loved to paint since his childhood, but he began painting pictures in the 1970s. In 1978, he once saw a wooden toy in a shop and decided to start cutting himself. Woodcarving was traditional in his native place.
In his sculptures, Suvorov repeated the same subjects that attracted him in painting: three horses, a bear, and fairy-tale characters riding on a gray wolf. In the 1980s, he began to exhibit his paintings and offer them for sale in an art salon in Kimry. Suvorov’s paintings - small, mainly hardwood-painted - express the naive idyllic image of the old-time Russian village. The main subjects of his pictures include mushroom pickers, peasant woman, crossing the river on a bridge, a walk with a concertina player, a festive table in the garden under apple trees (”Oh, It’s the Right Time for a Holiday!”, 1995), ”Winter Forest”, ”Golden Autumn”, and inspired by A. Aivazovsky’s reproductions that are rare for Russian naive art, marine species with a steam boat or a boat. Dense squat figures of peasants resemble sculptures that he cut from wood and painted in the same colors that we find in his pictures. He depicted a large white church, which he remembered from his childhood, but which was demolished. Suvorov’s paintings are very close to the typical image of Russian peasant picture art of an earlier time. The last ten years of his life he worked by the orders of collectors, but quite sincerely embodied the departing reality of rural life and the beauty of Russian nature.
