The more I travel the bigger the world seems, yet simultaneously, the smaller it becomes.
This felt true in of all places, a small village about 75km on the outskirts of Moscow on my way to Sergieve Posad to visit the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius.
I had booked the excursion with a local guide to have the benefits of expert knowledge while at the Monastery but also the opportunity to chat with someone who lives and works in Russia and learn more about everyday life. My guide Irina suggested that if I was interested, we could stop to visit the home of her friend’s parents in the small community of Leskhovo about halfway to our destination. She told me that the father of her friend had decorated his house and became a bit of a local celebrity. ‘Let’s do it’ I said!
We parked near the house along a side street and walked up to the front gate in order to access the property. The owner, Mr. Anatoly Mikhailovich Lovanov was waiting to greet us, smiling warmly and dressed formally in his grey suit and fedora.
Anatoly spoke no English and I no Russian, but with Irina as our translator the conversation was continuous, chatting about gardening, hockey, and the weather as we walked the property, admiring his art and passion project.
Anatoly, who was born in the 1940’s, had worked as a mechanic at a plastics factory. Around 1970 he decided to gather the residual material and use the coloured plastic scraps to decorate his home. Originally he thought that the plastic would protect his traditional wooden house from the sun but it wasn’t long before the practicality of adorning his home with the plastic quickly became more of an artistic endeavour.
Over time, Anatoly has decorated the entire main house in the fashion of the traditional wooden Russian houses that look like a gingerbread house out of Grimm’s fairy tales. He’s added new features like shutters to adorn the windows, decorative elements under the eaves and then, extended the decorating to other structures on the property...the fence, the garden, literally any and every surface.
The traditional wooden houses in Russia were considered works of art, with styles that could be attributed to a particular province and then to the craftsmen. Anatoly has boldly accomplished this with his unique design style. The geometric shapes that he’s cut out have mostly been transformed into patterns of flowers of varying types and colours. His sense of humour also comes out in the design with his series of storks on the washing line, one stork carrying a baby in its beak for a delivery.
I initially thought that travelling to this remote village in rural Russia would have felt the most “foreign” part of my trip to Russia but in fact the opposite occurred. Chatting with Anatoly about our similar customs, pastimes, and sports were so familiar in many respects as to how we live in Canada. More so, Anatoly’s passion for decorating his home reminded me of our own folk artist in Nova Scotia, Maud Lewis. Maud painted flowers and scenes on every surface predominantly on the inside of her little cottage where she lived in rural Nova Scotia. What started as a way to brighten up the space became her purpose and passion and she’s become an important artist representing our local heritage.
I thought of Maud when I met Anatoly. I imagined Anatoly adding a flourish of plastic flowers to the exterior of Maud’s house, and how Maud could mirror Anatoly’s artistic exterior with an equally whimsical painted interior. Two matching souls if ever there were, from rural towns where neither would ever know the other existed. That I have had the opportunity to visit both their homes and rural villages, and witness their respective artistic skills and personalities is the fruition of my passion for travel and seeing the big world get that little bit smaller.