The background can vary. A woman triumphantly carries flowers and fruits through the twilight, surrounded by fawning, subordinate men or figures wearing carnival masks whose dangerous beaks click with lust. A woman emanates from the surrounding flowers and fruit into the tragic situation. In one of the works of Mylnikova, we see a woman on a black goat, with pink specks of blood on her white dress, pale and surrounded by diabolical figures, one of which places upon her head a crown of thorns with his bony hand. Apparently, it is punishment for the vices from which a real woman, of course, does not escape. Vicious and worthy, against a rising and falling background of horrors in the warm twilight, the woman proceeds on her earthly journey.

Beautiful and slightly old-fashioned painting.

I feel proud for her accomplishments. Her works are beautiful, interesting and talanted; strokes and patches of colour therein have a special musical quality. Decorative elements essentially combine with acute feeling of colour and plastics. Portrayal of reality acquires a touch of personal experience and fantasy. This gives individuality to her art. With all my heart I wish her personal and professional success.

As a child, Vera used to paint with me at the studio princesses, kings, and still lifes. I was enchanted, as well as other painters, by her fantasy and marvellous beauty of painted spots and lines. When she began her study at the Academy, I was worrying that schooling and acquiring vital to a painter professional knowledge could suppress her delight of the visible world and freedom and spontaneity of creation. She set out to get back to herself, and, fortunately, she has done it.

The very first works of Vera Mylnikova, shown at exhibitions of young artists, aroused the interest in artistic circles. Her creative work has become an integral part of artistic life of Saint- Petersburg and the whole country. Whenever she is making a portrait, a still life, a landscape, a stained-glass window, or a wall-painting, she displays an inborn feeling of harmony, musical talent, and a profound skill of a colourist. In her painting traditions of realistic art are combined with incessant search of new findings in plastics.

These qualities, taken together, give her works the attractiveness of genuine art and a sense of harmony so essential for us today. This sense remains later, when decorative intensive festivity of her earlier works is substituted with inner tension and more dramatic treatment of familliar themes, motives and genres. The painter happily avoids temptations of fashion, market and situation, and trusts mostly her nature and insight. She keeps to enduring values and instruction given at a highly professional school — Academy of Arts.