This painting was created by Anatoly Bukharov, a member of the Artists’ Union of the USSR and an Honored Artist of the Komi Republic. He was born in the Irkutsk Region, studied in Leningrad, and spent most of his life in the Russian North. Northern nature was his main inspiration. He experimented with different techniques, including watercolor, linocut, drawing, and gouache.
Anatoly Bukharov made a series of paintings exploring the holidays and everyday life of the North, a cycle of drawings depicting the life of reindeer herders, and etchings dedicated to the Great Patriotic War. In the last years of his life, the artist shifted towards the genre of romantic landscape in which he subtly conveyed the poetry of harsh northern nature.
The composition of “Vorkuta Tundra” is based on dynamic horizontal lines which dominate the entire plane of the painting. Anatoly Bukharov’s landscapes are imbued with the painter’s poetic perception. He achieved a sense of vibration using the tonal possibilities of gouache, with the colors ranging from lemon yellow to medium blue and green.
The painting reflects a metaphorical view of nature with the powerful heavenly funnel ingesting the Arctic sun. There is a speechless dialogue going on between the two worlds — the vast grandeur of nature and the industrial strength of humans. They are separated from each other by a thin black strip of a fast coal train.
During the Great Patriotic War, coal from Vorkuta was referred to as “black gold”. After the German army captured the Donbas, which produced 60% of the country’s coal, the Kotlas–Vorkuta Railway, designed as part of the third five-year plan, was completed ahead of schedule. It was built by Gulag prisoners in the impassable tundra areas. By 1954, its total length had reached almost two thousand kilometers.
To produce coal, wells were drilled in permafrost and the Vorkuta Mechanical Plant was constructed. Vorkuta ensured the uninterrupted production and supply of coal to Moscow, besieged Leningrad, Cherepovets, Murmansk, Vologda, Kirov, and other Soviet cities. In 1942, the Urals produced 609 thousand tons of coal, and in 1945 — almost three million tons. The Pechora Coal Basin is one of the top 10 deposits in the world, with a reserve of 265 billion tons of coal.
