Valeria Nadezhdina and Michael Krapivin choose landscape as the main priority of their art. This is true not only about the views of their home city Nizhny Novgorod or lyrical sketches of the famous historical places around it – Bol’shoe Boldino, Makariev, Pavlovo… It is also true concerning the images of the cities visited while traveling in Russia, Spain and Italy – St. Petersburg and Moscow, Barcelona and Madrid, Toledo and Cadaqués, Venezia and Firenze, Roma and Milano.

The city image just can’t exist for the true Artist without very thorough information about the area where being born by nature and altered by generations of people genius loci (the spirit of a place) meets the modern age, where society meets culture and traditions and where every single day can be blown up by the infinity of the Cosmos (by the high riverside, by the giant gorge, by the volcanic snap or by the rocks). That is the City for him. The purpose of the Artist is not only to catch side of architecture and landscape peculiarities but to sense the movable and mutable look of the City. The Old City (the historical part of Nizhny Novgorod) is the most poetical and inviting. It has some enigma of deliberateness of being, of all-time way, of traditions which have quiet comfort combined with sense of fading away beauty.

Valeriya Nadezhdina and Michael Krapivin are not merely twinned by oneness of style but also by nearness of virtues. Light hints for reality are like unique colored flashes of memory in their pastel manner. Sometimes in quite ordinary sketches we observe people sitting in the coffee shops or strangers running in the rain. Poetry of urban streets turns into a reflection on the value of the human life and the charm of every moment of it.