A painter and graphic artist, Izmail Yefimov is a prominent artist in contemporary fine art of the Mari El Republic, a member of the Artists’ Union of Russia, a People’s Artist of the Mari El Republic, and an Honored Artist of Russia, who also designed the State Emblem and flag of the Mari El Republic. At the beginning of his career, the graduate of the Kazan Art College and the Surikov Moscow Art Institute worked in a realistic style, often turning to genre painting. Already in his graduation work, his commitment to the village theme, his native Mountain Mari land, was evident. Village life, front-line everyday life, native nature and the culture of his fellow villagers — those were the primary subjects for the painter in the 1970s and 1980s.

In his long-term work on the village theme, he set himself a difficult task: to find and reflect the moral and ethical foundations of Mari folk culture. The artist’s first success came with the works “Rural Gymnast”, “Seeing Off a Soldier Departing for the Front”, “Spring in the Gornomariysky District”, and “My Fellow Countrymen”. In these realistic works, the artist elaborates though the language of color on the beauty of his native land, on rural life, and on the people who live on the Mari land.

The painting “Seeing Off a Soldier Departing for the Front” immediately made Izmail Yefimov one of the leading painters of the Mari El Republic. The canvas was the result of serious reflections, and the artist once said:

The artist depicted a scene with family and friends saying goodbye to a young recruit with a short haircut, who attracts the attention of the viewer with his inner purity and childish defenselessness. The moment of parting is the climactic point of the picture. The soldier will go to fight, and his loved ones will take on their shoulders the burden of living in the rear. This idea is reinforced by the slender figure of a young woman with a baby in her arms, standing apart from the rest of the group. It is clear that she and her son were not spared by the war, and the thoughtfulness, inner concentration and composure of the village “Madonna” express suffering and hidden hope. The message of the painting is revealed not only through its characters, but also by the artist’s great approach to the space: behind the gate there is only a strip of bare earth that goes into the boundless sky. That is where the soldier must go. The painting “Seeing Off a Soldier Departing for the Front” is filled with a blessed memory of the past and the drama of wartime.