The book is dedicated to the artist, art reviewer, collector and teacher Jēkabs Strazdiņš (1905-1958) who was born in Jaunpiebalga.
As Latvia’s rural areas experience depopulation in the 21st century, the works of Jēkabs Strazdiņš, a sworn figuralist whose monumental efforts did not fully blossom and an expressive realist who never shied away from robust figures, particularly in his drawings (“I don’t want to paint cinematic beauties who are playing the roles of workers, rather I want real working people without powder and makeup!”), gain a mythically nostalgic relevance, reminding our supercilious contemporary world of the Bible verse: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Jānis Kalnačs
Strazdiņš achieved a great deal in a relatively short time, creating dozens of paintings and drawings as well as penning over 400 articles. He was also the founder of the Piebalga Art Museum and a revered teacher of drawing and Latvian art history at Riga’s 1st Gymnasium and later the Academy of Art and the University of Latvia Faculty of Philology, testifying to his being a very hardworking man whose creative career was disrupted by the Soviet occupation.
