The working days and traditional way of life are the themes of Mukhtar Mukambetov's creativity. He did not immediately find his own style. After creating several works in the manner of E. Moiseenko, he sharply distanced himself from it in his intimate portraits of children. His life drawing revealed the strong side of the artist's talent—his compositional intuition. As for the color solution, the artist struggles greatly to overcome the darkness of the palette, the dull colors resulting from unsuccessful mixing. He most successfully uses a specific palette, subtly modeling a particular color tonally. He finds it more challenging to achieve a multicolored effect resolved in local patches, which are not always harmonized in rhythm and tone.
A work that is largely innovative for Mukambetov is the painting "At the BChK Construction Site" (1978). The influence of Moiseenko's school is still discernible in the details, but overall the composition is perceived as an independent canvas. Among the documents of the era that served as source material for Mukambetov were the sculptures of O. Manuilova ("In Aid of the Front" and "Builders of the BChK").
The rhythm of labor serves as the musical image that Mukambetov embodies in his painterly language. The rhythmic structure characterizes his painting "At the BChK Construction Site," and it is also present in one of his best works, "Blue Windows" (1980).
For the 60th anniversary of the republic, Mukambetov painted "The First Women's Department in Pishpek under the Leadership of Ivanitsyna" (1984). The historical theme is addressed by the artist not without the influence of the academic school, which is evident in the compositional structure, the drawing of exotic garments, and the somewhat abstract beauty of Eastern women.
Despite the contradictory artistic solution (Ivanitsyna in a red scarf and the revolutionary slogan on a piece of cloth in a medieval setting are perceived as a temporal shift), this painting is a serious attempt to comprehend the classical heritage.
The psychological depth of the imagery system is characteristic of the works of many artists of this generation across any genre, although in most of their thematic paintings they reject narrative, preferring "showing" over "telling." They also reject plein air painting, creating a specific mood through the plasticity of forms and the beauty of the painterly texture.