The path of Vladimir Budnikov is a path in the mystery of painting. Picturesque is the defining feature of your figurative world. But your pictorial forms are very lively, changeable, diverse, like the very nature of this art form. In the book “Questions to the Visible” of the artist, we will talk about the views that characterized various stages on this path and about the images of the artist characterizing these stages. However, at some point in time, all this diversity and multilingualism, the dying off and at the same time the survivability of the old, timidity and oppression of the new intertwined into a kind of hybrid, manifesting a whole series of “transitional” works. This is felt, for example, in the still lifes from the series “Gifts of Ukraine” or the plot canvas “Wedding in the village of Glibovka” — they still guess the inertia of the skills learned in the monumental workshop (it was known that Tatiana Yablonska led in those years). It is difficult not to notice in these works also the author's piety to the traditions of the Ukrainian Baroque, Parsun, primitive. Although it was immediately obvious that this is not a piette of archaic stylists, but one that pushes back from modernity, the piety of a professional who is not interested in external techniques, but some avant-garde potency inherent in a similar heritage.