Semyon Bukharin’s Broom Snow Drawings at an Izhevsk School

Every winter morning, a school janitor in Izhevsk picks up his broom and turns the fresh snow outside Lyceum No. 25 into pictures. Semyon Bukharin sweeps portraits, fairy-tale animals and scenes into the snow under the classroom windows, and the pupils who call him "Uncle Senya" look down on a new drawing almost every time it snows.

Who is Semyon Bukharin?

Bukharin works as the janitor at Lyceum No. 25 in Izhevsk, a job he had held for about five years when Russia Beyond profiled him in 2016. His road to the schoolyard was a long one. He enrolled in an art school in the town of Tchaikovsky at 17 but left to help support his large family. He then worked as a fisherman in Kamchatka and served with Russia's Emergencies Ministry before taking the caretaker's job.

He started drawing in the snow a few years before that profile, once his regular clearing work was done. Students opened an Instagram account for him, and regional media soon picked up the story. "He is very kind!" one pupil told reporters.

How the broom drawings are made

The technique is simple and unforgiving. Bukharin sweeps snow away to expose the dark asphalt beneath, so every line is a contrast between white snow and black ground. He told reporters the drawings look best on dark asphalt just after a snowfall, while the snow is still soft. Trampled snow is useless, so he works only on a fresh fall.

• Time: a drawing takes about two hours, usually during the first lesson of the day.
• Tool: an ordinary broom, the same one he uses to clear the paths.
• Viewpoint: the pictures are made below the school windows, so the children see the whole composition from their classrooms.

Pushkin, composers and fairy-tale animals

His subjects are chosen with the school in mind. He has swept a portrait of the poet Alexander Pushkin, likenesses of Russian writers and composers, and a menagerie of fairy-tale animals. The school is a lyceum, so the drawings double as a gentle lesson in Russian culture.

The snow is only part of his output. In summer he paints landscapes on the house opposite the school, refreshing them every year. He has made a large poster of Pyotr Tchaikovsky for an anniversary and carved ice sculptures, including a group of three sheep.

Izhevsk, a city of long snowy winters

Izhevsk is the capital of the Udmurt Republic, about 800 miles (1,300 km) east of Moscow, with around 620,000 people at the 2021 census. It grew up around an ironworks founded in 1760 beside the Izh River, and the reservoir built for it, the Izhevsk Pond, still covers more than 22 km². The city is best known for arms making: the Izhmash factory began producing the AK-47 in 1948, and Mikhail Kalashnikov lived here until his death in 2013.

The climate gives Bukharin plenty of material. Snow falls on about 139 days a year, January nights average around −15 °C, and the snow cover reaches an average maximum depth of 62 cm in March. A janitor with a broom has a long season to work with.

More snow and sand art

Bukharin belongs to a wider family of artists who draw on the ground at large scale. Compare Sonja Hinrichsen’s walking-based snow drawings and Nele Azevedo’s temporary ice figures, or the snowshoe geometry and beach rakings below.

Related reading:

• Jim Denevan’s 2010 Lake Baikal Snow Circles: Geometry on a Frozen Lake
• Simon Beck’s Snow Art: Walking Geometry into Winter Landscapes
• Andres Amador’s Earthscapes: Geometry, Rakes and the Changing Beach
• Jamie Harkins and 3DSD: Anamorphic Beach Art in Full

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