Sergey Spitsyn. Interview MOKSergey Spitsyn. From the interview in MOC

There were three of us from the senior generation: A.B. Baturin, E.N. Alexandrova and me. Baturin had met Sterligov in the 30th years and two of us have got acquainted with Vladimir Vasilyevich in 1963. As you can see, all of us are still together. Each of us has approached to Vladimir Vasilyevich from the own side, but the most important thing that all of us are modern artists, and it means that we work with forms of present time. Elizaveta Nikolaevna and me, we have graduated from Academy of Arts, I - in 1954, she -  a little bit later, we have got together Stalin’s scholarships, but we weren’t satisfied by an education system of that time, we felt that we have no white truth in our work.

What Sterligov has done in art: he was teaching how «to look at the Earth through the Sky» i.e. when we represented an object, he was teaching us to watch spiritual sence of an object.

As Vladimir Vasilyevich spoke, «art needs religion, as the justification». I consider that it is the only case in art not only in our country, but also in the whole world when the combination of a plastic form and spiritual filling is reached.

When someone is engaged consciously and long into tradition of  Sterligov’s Bowl-Dome Genesis, the inspiration comes and you begin to see spiritual essence of things and the Nature.

In my opinion the modern iconography has to go by this way, it should represent the Earth through the Sky, and do not assimilate Saints to the Earth because the Saint person belongs to two worlds: the Earth  and the Heaven. And very often in an iconography, especially of the 19th century, the first part prevailed because they represented the Saint almost like in the photo, but the Saint is another one, he is spiritual, he couldn’t be represented in such a way.

Sergey Spitsyn. From the interview in MOC