The Ivanovo artist Rufel Fyodorovich Mikhailov was born in 1936 in the town of Rodniki. In 1956, he graduated from the Ivanovo Art College. He worked in an art workshop in Novomoskovsk, and from 1960 — in the creative workshops of the Ivanovo branch of the Art Fund of the RSFSR. In 1968, he became a member of the Artists’ Union of the RSFSR. Rufel Mikhailov took part in many regional, zonal, republican and All-Union exhibitions.

Mikhailov was acclaimed for his masterful portraits of female workers. He essentially created an art gallery of Ivanovo textile workers. For years, the artist devoted a lot of his time to this theme; in the 1960s he worked a lot in the workshops of the Dyed Yarn Factory and the Dzerzhinsky Weaving Factory.

The artist painted living people, showing female beauty and grace both in the working process and in moments of rest. Rufel Mikhailov revealed the faces of yarn spinners to the world — he called them “flowers”, “Madonnas”, and “Slavic women”.

The artist’s paintings embody the tradition of Russian Romantic Realism with its love for human nature and a landscape motif, with confidence of intonation, intimacy, and a lyrical narrative. It was he, the “romantic” Rufel, who created a gallery of typical representatives of the 1960s–1980s: specialists and shock workers, experts, and young workers, who no longer aspired to a collective future, but hoped to personally achieve a “bright tomorrow”.

In the painting “A Heart-to-Heart”, he depicted two textile workers having a casual conversation before the shift. The captivating spontaneity of the characters speaks to the artist’s observation skills. Their images are both deeply individual and typified. It is also important that the artist relied on his studies made from life; as a result, one can feel his profound emotion. “I painted feelings!” recalled Rufel Mikhailov.

Rufel Mikhailov created murals at the Ivanovo University, the Perinatal Center, the tuberculosis dispensary, and the Research Institute of Motherhood and Childhood. The Honored Artist of the Russian Federation died in 2022 at the age of 85.