Yury Viktorovich Nikolaev is a contemporary Russian painter whose primary subjects are still life arrangements of food.
Some of his compositions — filled with crockery, baked goods, baskets and flowers — have a kind of homespun, folksy-craftsy charm that would not be out of place in a magazine devoted to recipies, but they are so well painted I won’t hold that against him (grin).
If you find some of the large images available of his work, you will find them nicely painterly, with much attention paid to value and surface texture.
I can’t find anything I can identify as an official website for him, so I’ve linked to some gallery sites that feature his work.
You can also try a Google image search.
You may find additional sites and images by searching for the Russian translation of “artist Nikolayev Yuri”: Художника Николаева Юрия
