Paul Allik’s creative heritage is richly diverse. Lines, colours, figures, soft lines, geometrical lines, the definite and the indefinable; nudes, landscapes and still lives, bound together by idyll – the distinctly perceptible sentiment in everything.  Allik’s works are not just creation; they are a combination of creativity and rationality that is always realised perfectly. Drawing, drawing and once again drawing was the very thing that kept the artist in shape day after day. Technical incompetence was not to hold back his free thought.
When a couple of years ago the exhibition called “Namibian landscapes” in Haus Gallery put before the public an important part of Allik’s creative work – plein air landscapes, then the exhibition in ArtDepoo “My Idyll” displays sensual nudes and abstract compositions painted in free expressive style.



The poetic name of the exhibition conveys the deeper meaning of the works chosen for the display. “My Idyll” – something that was unpretentiously characteristic of Allik. Independent and defiant of the conjuncture he created his own idyll, where not only the artist could escape to but where anyone, whose eyes are caught by the amazing world of the painter, can escape yet today. “My Idyll” is the artist’s statement, his point of view, his slogan, an announcement of the fact that the idyll exists and does so even in a world that is in turmoil. Everything depends on the point of view. And we are not talking about the artist’s wish to see everything through pink glasses but rather about his wish to see the harmony in everything, even in nostalgia. All this speaks about Paul Allik as an excellent and admirable artist.

From a pragmatic aspect Paul Allik was an artist who was born in 1946 into the family of an Orthodox priest. He graduated from Tartu Art School in 1966 where Alfred Kongo, the painter and lecturer who carried onward the painting traditions of “Pallas”, became his mental tutor. Kongo, who is considered to be one of the last artists of Pallas School of Arts, passed on to the young artist the old school’s lessons on the values of painting – how to capture light and shadow, how to depict figures and objects as precisely as possible, and first and foremost – the skill of drawing. Paul Allik as a technically strong drawer did not use colours in restrained tonality like his teacher but handled them with playful verve and unexpected courage, leaving plenty of air, space and freedom between the colours and the well-composed images.
The course of Paul Allik’s creative path was clearly outlined– from naturalistic portraits of the 1970s he moved on to free-form expressionism in the 1980s and from there to abstractionism in the 1990s. Yet pure abstractionism was not his goal, he rather balanced on the thin borderline between abstract and recognizable.
Paul Allik left us in 2003 during the cold days of the year’s end. His creative heritage is carefully preserved by his family whose main wish is to keep the artist’s memory alive and let him live on through his works. Works that have the ability to communicate over time and space, and over everything that may inhibit us as human beings.