The exhibition of the Iskitim Museum of Arts and History includes a painting by Ivan Petrovich Popov titled “Spring Flood”.

The landscape was painted in 1979, five years after the death of the artist’s cousin, the renowned film director, actor, and writer Vasily Makarovich Shukshin. The painter’s works from this period are still realistic but somewhat darker. It was a difficult time for Ivan Popov. He was grieving the loss of a person who was very dear to him. The choice of the season in this painting is also not accidental. Spring, with its melting snow, was Vasily Shukshin’s favorite time of year. “Right across the Chuya Highway, under the bridge, there was a lot of snow melting during the spring thaw, and a rush of meltwater would flood our street — Kharyuzovka… Now, whenever I visit Srostki, I try to recognize these places… there are no such floods anymore, there is less snow, and the ground is drier,” Ivan Popov reminisced.

The art critic Tatyana Yevgenyevna Sokolskaya said,

The small motherland was a central theme in the art of Ivan Popov. In many of his picturesque landscapes, the artist depicted his native village of Srostki. It was there that he spent his childhood, and although his family later decided to leave the village, Ivan Popov stayed connected to his roots throughout his life. “I was a bad student at school. I kept drawing in class and was missing Siberia. I was even sent out of class and my mother was called to the principal’s office. My drawings brought my mother to tears because they depicted our native village of Srostki,” the artist later recalled.