The monumentalist artist Vladimir Georgievich Butorin most vividly and originally expressed himself in easel painting. Unlike Bakashev, his easel works do not show the influence of monumental art.
He works in various genres— thematic painting, portraiture, landscape, and still life. Butorin rarely works from life, possessing a vivid creative imagination, artistic taste, and a strong academic background in drawing, composition, and painting. This allows him to realize his fantasies not only in a highly professional form but also emotionally in their imagery. The images in his thematic and portrait (conditionally portrait, as they are painted without a model as arbitrary fantasies on themes of abstract ideals) paintings are mainly created through the painterly-plastic harmony of structural masses, the poetry of color, and textural rhythm.
In the paintings "Archaeologists" (1977), "Hunters with Golden Eagles" (1980), and "Back at the Native Hearth" (1985), the landscape plays a significant role, while in the paintings "Children's Masquerade" (1978), "Under the Canopy" (1981), and portraits from different years, the background is conditional, perceived as a spatial environment with a lively flicker and color transitions.
Butorin's works, thematically connected to specific realities, are resolved without illustrative accuracy; in them, reality is transformed by the artist's imagination into a unique poetry of mood, a poetry of the spiritual world of extraordinary professions.
The informativeness of the structural elements of the paintings is somewhat blurred, even shattered, like crystals, into numerous strokes that seem to live an independent life. Such a solution requires effort to immerse oneself in the pictorial images, which seem to assemble before our eyes from disparate particles.
In the painting "Hunters with Golden Eagles," the twilight-hot, even stuffy color scheme at first glance hinders the movement of the gaze into the space where the outlines of human figures are vaguely outlined. However, overcoming the resistance of the color palette and pictorial structure, which in themselves possess a strong emotional impact, we seem to enter an expansive space of rocky semi-desert, to gaze with a vague feeling of anxious wonder at the simple features of ordinary people and feel the truth of their existence.
The painting "Back at the Native Hearth" was created for the 40th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. The artist depicted a vast valley in the evening twilight. In the center of the painting, with their backs to the viewer, sit a soldier returned from the front and his wife, silently and thoughtfully gazing at the fire of the hearth. The essence of the image is peace and silence, emphasized by the character of the landscape receding into the distance beyond the low horizon, the everyday poverty of the native home, worn down over the years of war without male hands, and the touching appearance of the fragile woman frozen next to the man, who has not yet had time to take off his soldier's uniform, and the mood of immeasurable happiness that the quiet nature shares with the people.
Alexander Fyodorovich Voronin also works in various genres in his easel art. He is one of the few who prefers industrial motifs in landscapes, emphasizing their unique rhythmic quality, their distinctive beauty, and skillfully combining them with the natural environment. Not setting plein air tasks for himself, Voronin approached the complex task of connecting conflicting phenomena from the perspective of technical aesthetics, exploring the dialectics of their interrelation.
His best work in this regard is the painting "Uch-Kurgan" (1968), in which the enormous metal containers, pipes, and a strip of railway, scorched by the sun, are depicted with great skill and realism. A note of human warmth is introduced by the depiction of a man and a woman sitting down for a conversation on a clay hill. The painting is clearly composed in terms of rhythms and masses, painted in a noble pearl-gray palette with tempera paints, which create a velvety surface with smooth painting. All volumes are finely and harmoniously modeled tonally.
A significant part of his work is occupied by compositional portraits, in which the artist often depicts interiors, enriching the spatial environment with various details and thereby creating a complex imagery ("Portrait of Hero of the Soviet Union Usenbekov K." 1975).
Among thematic paintings, the most significant is "M. V. Frunze in Turkestan. 1919" (1980). The painting truthfully recreates the atmosphere of the revolutionary era, both through the character of the interior and the typical images of the associates of the great commander.
