Vladimir Bogatkin

Vladimir Bogatkin acquired art education in the 1930ies in Leningrad. He was an appreciated freelance artist and also a recognized stage artist, working mainly in the Moscow Central Theatre.
His works have become part of the Estonian artistic picture maybe because of his marriage with Estonian water-colour painter Valli Lember-Bogatkina. The artist stayed in Estonia frequently and painted here a number of landscapes and cityscapes.
Vladimir Bogatkin does the same with a cityscape as Aleksander Vardi does with a landscape. Also he considers the city to a great extent a pretext for speaking about painting: while painting the red roofs of the old city, Bogatkin concentrates with a rarely seen attention on the light, its different angles of falling and qualities. And if Vardi can skilfully show the transformations of green, then Bogatkin conducts a research in similarily skilful manner of different variations of reddish shades. Roofs of the old city that have transformed into a sign of their own, become here the bearers of the romantic atmosphere. We should not be looking for a dry tourist view, as the focus of the attention of Bogatkin is elsewhere. In case of a cityscape there exist hundreds of possibilities from industrial landscapes to billboards, but Bogatkin’s Vaade Tallinnale (A view of Tallinn) has chosen the most alluring form.