Galina Ivanova, Дом украшен капсулами / House decorated with bottle caps

pictures from website Tutu Art 2021, that reports about a 
competition among non-professional artists
organised by the Tutu travel organisation

Markovo is a village with about 750 inhabitants (in 2010), located in the Republic of Mari El, part of the Russian Federation, about 800 km east of Moscow. The elongated village consists of a number of houses, located to the left and right of a main road.

A self-decorated house

One of these houses attracts attention because of the colorful decorations that adorn the outside, a project undertaken in 2015 by Galina Ivanova, who lives in this house, 

Not much biographical information about Galina is available on the internet. 

It is mentioned that she is retired, and there is a second fact, very interesting from an art environments point of view: she is related to Tatyana Mikheeva, who is her aunt and who was presented earlier in this blog as creator of a house decorated with bottle caps.

Galina visited Tatyana in the early 2010s and she was apparently inspired by Tatyana's artistic creation, because when she was back in Markovo she decided to decorate her own house in the same way.

Galina started decorating her own house in 2015, the first subject being the image of a dog, placed on the right of the two windows of the house on the side of the road. 

After that, all kinds of images followed, such as swans, a horse, a butterfly, a rooster and also a variety of decorative patterns, all added to the exterior walls of the house. 

Meanwhile, the front and side walls have been fully decorated. and now a decoration has also appeared on the fence that separates the area next to the house from the street, a fence that offers space for more decorations.

Both Galina Ivanova's and Tatyana Mikheeva's site were selected in 2021 to participate in a Most Valued Non-Professional Creation competition organised by Tutu, a Russian travel organisation.

Documentation

* Entry on the website Tutu Art 2021, with a series of pictures

* Short article (November 2021), mainly mentioning the Tutu competition, on website VNB

* Short article (April 2019) on the website of newspaper Seldon News

Galina Ivanova

House decorated with bottle caps

Village of Markovo, Orsha district, Republic of Mari El, Russia

can be seen from the street

streetview

Tatyana Mikheeva, Дом украшен крышками от бутылок / House decorated with bottle caps

pictures from website Tutu Art 2021, that reports about a 
competition among non-professional artists
organised by the Tutu travel organisation

Sychevka is a small, rural village with nine streets and some 580 inhabitants, located in the Svobodnensky district in the Amur region in the Far East of Russia [1]. The village is home to a house and adjacent small buildings in the garden that have been decorated with colorful bottle caps.

Life and works

This capsule cover was applied by Tatyana Mikheeva, who started the project around 2000, when she and her husband came to live in Sychevka. 

The immediate reason for the project was that planks used as walkways in the garden, got moldered in some places. To remedy that, Tatyana and her husband covered those spots with bits of plastic, cut from plastic bottles.

This inspired her to use plastic bottle caps to decorate the exterior walls of the house. Once started she couldn't stop and it became a project that would keep Tatyana busy for many years to come.

More than 32,000 bottles and kilograms of tiny nails have been used to decorate the exterior walls of the house and adjacent buildings. Her husband worked as a railway machinist and was often away from home, so most of the decorative work was done by Tatyana.

The villagers were skeptical at first, but once they got used to the capsule cover, they would help collect bottles and when they had visitors from elsewhere, show them the decorated house.

Tatyana came up with the design of the decorations herself. She chalked it up to the wall and then proceeded to fill it systematically, capsule after capsule.

This with the exception of the large, elongated panel with swans, the design of which was offered by a professional artist.

In 2010, Galina Ivanova from the village of Markovo in the Mari El Republic of Russia, visited Tatyana Mikheeva, who is her family, and was apparently so inspired by the decorations that she started to decorate her own house in the same way.

In the late 2021st, the Russian travel company Tutu organized a competition in episodes, each time showing a number of special, out-of-the-art creations, about which the public was allowed to express preferences. 

In the November 2021 round, Tatyana Mikheeva's site was nominated, but she did not receive the most votes.

Documentation

* Article (February 2014) on the website of newspaper Amur Info

* Article (June 2020) by Anna Azanova on the website My Madonna

* Article (November 2021) on the website of newspaper Port Amur

* Article (February 2014) on the website of OTR TV, with a video

Video

* Video by Amurlife TV (August 2020, YouTube, 3'50")

* Video (February 2014) on the website of OTR TV

note

[1] Characteristic sites in the Asian part of the Russian Federation are included in this weblog in order to give a balanced and coherent picture of the entire field of Russian art environments:

Tatyana Mikheeva

House decorated with bottle caps

Village of Sychevka, Svobodnensky District, Amur region, Russia

can be seen from the road 

Anatoly Komlev, Дом украшен крышками для бутылок / House decorated with bottle caps

this picture and the next two
from regional journal E1.ru

Shurala is a small community of some 450 inhabitants in the Sverdlovsk region in Russia, some 90 km north of Yekaterinburg and as the crow flies about 20 km from the village of Kunara, where Russia's most famous art environment is located, the decorated house of the blacksmith Sergey Kirillov.

The community of Shurala is not only known for the monumental church building in the center of the village, built in the early 1900s, a structure with five domes and a church tower. But the village also surprises visitors with no less than two houses with a colorfully decorated exterior, one created by Vladimir Serebryakov, the other by Anatoly Komlev, whose creation is reviewed in this post.

Life and work

Anatoly Stepanovich Komlev, born in 1949, became an employee of the Russian railways. In the late 1990s as a station worker he was transferred to O.p. 419, a stop near the community of Shurala on the rail link between Yekaterinburg and Anatol'skaya.

Aided by a neighbor, in a year's time he built his own home on the premises of the train stop.

At the suggestion of the neighbor's wife, Vera Zinovieva, in 2001 Komlev started decorating the house with colorful bottle caps. according to drawings for embroidery Vera had sketched on a wall.

It became a project that would keep Komlev active for about fifteen years. 

Almost all walls of the house and outbuildings have been decorated with often man-sized  colorful decorations made of bottle caps. There are various images of flowers, but also of a rooster, a dog, a lake with ducks....

Around 2016, when Komlev was in his late sixties, he decided to terminate the project.

Documentation

* Article (September 2015) in regional journal E1.ru, with more pictures

Anatoly Komlev

House decorated with bottle caps

at the premises of train stop O.p. 419

near Shurala, Sverdlovsk region, Russia

can be seen from the street

Vladimir Serebryakov, Дом украшен крышками для бутылок / House decorated with bottle caps

Serebryakov decorating the facade of his house (2017)

 pictures are screenprints from the video in the documentation

Shurala is a small community of some 450 inhabitants in the Sverdlovsk region in Russia, some 90 km north of Yekaterinburg and as the crow flies about 20 km from the village of Kunara, where Russia's most famous art environment is located, the decorated house of the blacksmith Sergey Kirillov.

The community of Shurala is not only known for the monumental church building in the center of the village, built in the early 1900s, a structure with five domes and a church tower. But the village also surprises visitors with no less than two houses with a colorfully decorated exterior, one made by Anatoly Komlev and another by Vladimir Serebryakov, whose creation is reviewed in this post.

Life and works

Born in 1959 Vladimir Nikolayevich Serebryakov in 2012, so when he was in his early fifties, began decorating the exterior of his house.

He had no training as an artist and he was not really involved in art either. The idea of decorating the house came spontaneously when he saw pictures of embroidery in a magazine of his daughter and thought that he could make something similar, using colored bottle caps.

The picture above shows that the colored bottle caps are attached to the wooden base with a nail.

Actually, these nails are the only material that comes at a cost. The caps are in principle available for free, but large numbers are required, about a thousand pieces per square meter of wall. 

Fortunately family members help collect them.

In an initial phase of the project, Serebryakov added creations which refer to Russian fairytale characters, as in above picture.

Then Serebryakow began working the fence next to the house. 

The picture above shows three of the around five somewhat more complex creations he added to the fence, a mysterious oriental princess on the left, an assembly of flowers in the middle and two swans on the right.

an image on the fence in detail

Later Serebryakov began decorating the front of the house, starting with the top part.

The first picture in this post shows how far decorating the front side had progressed in 2017.

The upper part is already finished. It includes a decorated roof molding.

And the triangular space below the molding has a scene with two large fish (dolphins?), an island with a palm tree and a cabin and two sailing boats on the water.

The picture below gives an impression of the decorated facade, with at the bottom images of two colorful waterfowl in a wetland environment

Around the end of 2018, Serebryakov considered his creative activity as complete.

Documentation

* Article (September 2015) in regional journal E1.ru, with a variety of pictures
* Website Uraloved has an article (2015) about Shurala village with two pictures of the site

Video

* Video (July 2017, YouTube) by Настоящее Время, the part about the decorated house
starts at 8.27

Vladimir Serebryakov

House decorated with bottle caps

st. Sovetskaya 51

Shurala, Sverdlovsk region, Russia

can be seen from the street
the site is located along the same street as the Temple,
but more to the south

Vladimir and Elena Aleshko, Дом украшен крышками для бутылок / House decorated with bottle caps

 this picture and the next six (2017) courtesy of newspaper TUT.BY 

(photographer Elena Bychkova)

The picture above shows a decorated house in the village of Bril’kov, part of the community of Volozhin in Belarus. At first glance it seems that we are dealing here with frescoes, but that is not the case, these decorations have been created by using caps from plastic bottles.

Life and works

This is a rather young art environment. The project was begun in the midst of 2014 after Elena Aleshko with a grandson was browsing a book about special architecture and was impressed by a house decorated with bottle caps.

She talked about this with her husband Vladimir Aleshko, who was retired, and together they decided to try to realize such a decoration themselves.

A pilot project consisting of making a decoration with two swans (still present on the front side, see first photo) proved successful and from that moment on the life of the couple was completely dominated by the further decoration of house and yard.

Each of the two had a clear role. Elena sought and selected examples and made the designs. Up close it is easy to see that a variety of scenes has been carried out in a cross-stitch pattern as is usual in embroidery. Vladimir would take care of the assembly and eventual construction works, such as the construction of a summer house to realize more exhibition space.

In preparing the addition of a new scene, first a drawing is made at actual size, which on test is inlaid with caps. If the result pleases, the creation will be applied to the appointed spot.

In the summer of 2017, after the Aleshko couple had been working on the project for some three years, the decorations altogether covered an area of about 100 m² and it was estimated that some 100.000 caps had been processed.

These caps are only partially derived from their own household. Vladimir Aleshko gets part of the material from a nearby waste processing company that recycles plastic bottles without using the caps.

Various themes can be distinguished in the decorations.

A variety of animals has been depicted and then a lot of attention is paid to cartoon characters and heroes from well-known Russian television series.

Sport is another important theme. 

As can be seen in the picture below, one of the walls has references to the World Hockey Championship (Minsk 2014), the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi (2014) and the football World Cup in Russia (2018).

Documentation

* Elena Bychkova, article (July 2017) in newspaper TUT.BY (Minsk, Belarus)

* In the summer of 2017 the international Peace Run came past the house of the Aleshko couple, which was reported on their website

Vladimir and Elena Aleshko

House decorated with bottle caps

Bril'kov, Volozhin, Belarus

site can be seen from the street