The Russian artist Natalia Ivanovna Buldakova (Smirnova) can be seen as a follower of the ideas of the Russian avant-garde movement. To her, art is the pursuit of new forms, an attempt to find her own form of self-expression.

Kostroma became one of the ever-present subjects in Natalia Buldakova’s art made during the late 1980s — the early 1990s. This was when her art style gained its boldness, certainty and confidence. Her works began to be displayed at exhibitions of young artists.

When creating her paintings, Natalia Buldakova turned her attention to a wide range of places in the city, but she mostly kept to the historical part of Kostroma. Her painting “Rain” is an urban landscape, in which one can recognize the architectural ensemble of the old city.

The painting depicts the bell tower of the five-domed Church of the Savior. As in reality, it is naturally integrated into the Trade Rows, which are distinguished by their sense of contrast and harmony, thus creating a dynamic city skyline.

Buldakova was undoubtedly attracted by the harmony and coherence of classicist architecture. But she did not seek to recreate the actual view of the bell tower familiar to every resident of the city. Natalia Buldakova’s imagination produced a mystical image of Kostroma, whose main characters were fragments of old buildings that merged with the elements of nature like mirages.

The images of Trade Rows and bell towers took on a life of their own. The slim building, as if washed-out by the rain, lost its natural shape and proportions, and became an expression of Natalia Buldakova’s state of mind and emotional experience. There are no people in the painting, and the dark square between the Rows looks deserted. It seems that the fleeting, blurry image of the city is dissolved by the forces of rain.

With this painting, the artist experimented with color and texture complexity. She used large muted color spots — predominantly different shades of blue and gray — with which she aimed to convey a sense of depth and mystery of a rainy summer evening.