Igor Smirnov, a son of famous Russian landscape artist Vasili Smirnov, began painting when he was very young. Eventually, he developed his own unique style of "symbolic realism." It bears no resemblance to either socialistic realism or any of the numerous avant-garde 'isms' of the twentieth century. The artist considers a piece of art as a source of information presented in symbolic form that is associated by contemporary audience as a virtual space of our spiritual life. Smirnov is not interested in the analytical division of objects into their components. His method is really the opposite. It is the melding of forms rather than their destruction, harmony, not dissonance. People, beasts, birds, fish, fruits, flowers, art objects, everything is united by the beauty of Igor Smirnov's harmonious fantasy world that stands before us like the embodiment of music in line and color.