In painting, a sketch is a preparatory phase before the painter starts creating the work. Through this small form, a painter can elaborate on the lightning, colors, shapes, perspectives, and composition. A sketch can be a part of a large painting as well. However, contemporary painters increasingly think of sketches as of works of art in themselves. The ‘Vetluga’ by painter Denis Moskvin is exactly this kind of a self-depended sketch. 

Born near Nizhny Novgorod, he graduated from the Nizhny Novgorod School of Arts, and then attended courses at the Russian Academy of fine arts, sculpture and art of building of Ilya Glazunov in Moscow. In 2014, he returned to his homeland, where he became a teacher at a local Children’s Art School in the village of Varnavino. He completed a whole series of sketches, capturing the beauty of Povetluzhje — the territories along the riverbanks of the Vetluga River. 

This sketch by Moskvin depicts a spring landscape. There is still snow, massive ice blocks are slowly floating along the river: the mighty Vetluga is just beginning to awaken from its long winter sleep. Even in spring, the nature of the Russian north is austere and composed, but at the same time majestic and mysterious. Moskvin captures the atmosphere of mystery especially well: with neat color palette and a confident quick stroke, he added a quiet mystery to the dense forests, the steep bank, the unpredictable and dangerous course of a taiga river. 

It is no coincidence that these places were a plentiful source of inspiration for many painters, writers, and religious figures. The taiga lands of the Vetluga were admired by the writers Vladimir Korolenko and Mikhail Prishvin during their whole life. In these same remote but attractive northern expanses, the Holy Reverend Barnabas of Vetluga found his spiritual birth. 

According to the legends, he came to these remote places from Veliky Ustyug of the Kostroma province in 1417. He immediately fell in love with this deserted and wild territory: though it has been devastated during the bloody Mongol conquests, it was there that he found his refuge. He built a small cell here, and later a monastery. According to legend, Barnabas of Vetluga was able to convert the people of the hostile northwestern Mari tribes to Ortodoxy, thereby reducing the number of their destructive raids on Russian settlements. Today he is considered the main spiritual guardian of Povetluzhje.