Love to nature is the main topic of Nikolay Mescherin’s art work. Already in his youth he was interested in photography to depict changeable states of Moscow region landscape. The camera helped to stop the moment. Young Mescherin’s attention is drawn to such picturesque events as snow melting, stony water in a ravine, a line of winding paths in the forest. Time seems to stop in these photos. All of a sudden a man appears. He can hunt or collect flowers in the forest but he is usually shown as a part of nature, though not always the limited part of it. If we look closer, it becomes obvious that a person is posing with a certain stiffness. Tense poses of all people in the photos are justified by technical necessity – back then a camera’s exposure was a few minute and all this time models had to be looking into the lens and to be standing still.
Mescherin was interested in photography throughout his whole life but, unfortunately, black and white photos couldn’t show all the richness of nature’s color pallete. And when the artist wanted to depict the beauty of a moonlit night or an early sunrise, he took brushes and paints and used a fast impressionistic technique. But still something from photography was transmitted to his paintings. This idea to depict an immediate impression from something seen, to create an atmosphere of personal anxiety of nature here and now through fast strokes.