Leningrad in winter

Impression of Leningrad in winter, painted in acrylic. Ian, January 2022.

I was fortunate enough (far more fortunate with hindsight than I realised at the time) to live as a student in the Soviet Union for several months in the autumn and winter of 1978. Life was immeasurably different then, in a communist state that was still in a nuclear standoff with the West.

I could tell many tales of Soviet life and the good friends I made in Leningrad (now reverted to its original name of Saint Petersburg) and I may revisit them again in other posts if time allows, but this one is simply the story of a walk in the city centre in the winter. I was taking images on an SLR with slide film, and found this view of the Pevchesky Bridge over the Moyka river, looking east towards Palace Square, the Alexander Column and in the far distance the gleaming dome of St Isaac's Cathedral.

For many years this languished in an old slide collection until I decided to scan and revisit them digitally. Not only did this give the images a completely new lease of life, but it also allowed me to correct mistakes from the past, such as using normal film under fluorescent light resulting in images with a strong green colour cast. Suddenly the past had become new again!

You will see below the image as originally taken, and if you are sufficiently interested you can see the same view as it looks today using this link and pulling up a Street View from that location. It's just a stone's throw from the apartment where Russia's most revered writer Alexander Pushkin lived until his death resulting from a duel in 1836.

Pevchesky Bridge in winter, 1978

One remarkable thing about this scene is the lack of road traffic - the roads were rarely very busy in those days as private car ownership was extremely rare and most people traveled on foot or by trolleybus and the extensive metro (remarkably deep underground due to the boggy ground on which the city was built, and fascinating and impressive in itself yet still overshadowed by the glories of the underground in Moscow).

Looking at this same view today, over 40 years later, relatively little has changed - the bridge, the street furniture and the buildings are largely as they were. Indeed, the view captured in 1978 could probably have passed for one from when the bridge was first constructed, just a few years after Pushkin's death.

As for my painting itself - well I'm quite pleased with it as an early attempt by a beginner painter, but there is clearly a very great deal that could be done to improve it. I have a tendency to paint quickly and rush to complete the work, which means that my colour palette can be rather dodgy and the attention to detail (even the number of rows of windows) is not what it should be.

The picture below shows the work in progress, and I think it did improve somewhat when I revisited the colour of the buildings and bridge to tone them down a bit (especially the stonework of the embankment, which I remembered from long ago as being fashioned from a wonderful dark rose pink granite). Thankfully acrylic painting gives you complete freedom to overpaint your mistakes...!

The painting in progress, January 2022