The exhibition of the Iskitim Museum of Arts and History features a study for Ivan Popov’s painting “Bidding My Son Farewell”.

There is only one person in this painting — an elderly man depicted against a backdrop of railway tracks. This is Ivan Popov himself. This painting is more than just a self-portrait. Ivan Popov depicted himself as a representative of ordinary Russian people, the likes of characters in Vasily Shukshin’s stories, a large social group that was slowly fading away. He is the central figure in the painting, full of emotions and thoughts about the fate of his native land, the village of Srostki, and the entire Russian countryside. “Bidding My Son Farewell” is a sad reflection on the dying villages. With young people leaving, only elderly people remained to spend the rest of their lives there.

After creating a study for the painting “Bidding My Son Farewell” in the late 1970s, Ivan Popov kept returning to it for more than ten years but eventually left it unfinished.

In the preface to his autobiography “Diary of an Artist”, Ivan Popov wrote,

The theme of the native land permeates the art of two talented cousins from the village of Srostki — Ivan Petrovich Popov and Vasily Makarovich Shukshin.