Professor of the Academy of Arts Mikhail Vasilyevich Matyushin studied color not separately but in connection with the environment. He discovered the “connecting color” between two other colors — that of the environment and of the object or base.

The artist noticed that this third color maintains the balance between the object and the environment, without violating the spatial significance of the base color. These features can be found in the work “Ice Floes of the Barents Sea” by his student Irina Walter.

Irina Vladimirovna Walter was born in 1903 in Bialystok of the Grodno Governorate, which nowadays is Poland. The artist’s father Voldemar Karlovich Walter was a forestry scientist and descended from Norwegian barons. In Saint Petersburg, the family lived on Ofitserskaya (present-day Decembrists’) Street.

In her book “Sukhovey. Memories of a Geneticist”, Raisa Lvovna Berg wrote,

In 1922, Irina entered the painting department of the Academy of Arts and started attending the workshop on spatial realism led by Professor Matyushin. Four years later, she graduated from the Academy. While still a student, Irina Walter began to travel around the country. She traveled through the Khibiny Mountains, Lake Baikal, and Primorye. She visited the Yamal Peninsula, Franz Josef Land, the islands in the Arctic Ocean, Central Asia, Karelia, Crimea, the Karakum Desert and Kamchatka.

In 1930, she exhibited northern and Yamal landscapes as part of the Collective of Extended Observation. Walter was one of the artists who helped to compile the tables for “The Reference Book of Color”. Since 1932, she collaborated as an illustrator with several publishing houses and designed hundreds of children’s books, textbooks and alphabet books for Russian children and children of the native peoples of the North. In 1975, these Irina Walter’s achievements were rewarded with the first-degree diploma at the book contest of the All-Union Exhibition of National Economy.

The artist took part in many exhibitions of Leningrad graphic artists. Her works were represented most fully at her personal exhibition “Kamchatka” (1969) and the exhibition of easel and book graphics (1978) in Leningrad.