Panorama of Porvoo/Borga - 3rd oldest city of Finland painted in oil by Marina and Slava Olchevski

History of Porvoo's Panorama

What the heck is "Porvoo's Panorama".

Click on the image to open another window with a detailed view of Porvoo's Panorama.
Use scrollbars to scrol through the window, please. It will take about 1 min. for 28.8K modem to load a whole set.

Finishing touches..

Panorama in the studio

What will you do to paint the bottom areas ?

It didn't become a part of a wall here.

It is a lot of manual labour.

History.
Porvoo (another name Borga) is a small city around 30 miles from Helsinki, the capital of Finland. It was founded 653 years ago by Swedish people. There was a fortress built at the mouth of Porvoo river. The old city is stretched along the banks of the river. It is well preserved too, as you can see on this panoramic image.

650 anniversary of Porvoo

In 1995 there was a celebration of Porvoo's 650-years anniversary. Our good friends Pekki and Margareta Bagge live in this city and we visited them often. The whole atmosphere is different from what we have in St.Petersburg. No wonder that a Russian tzar Alexander II had a summer house just outside Porvoo.

More paintings from Porvoo

Anyway, we decided to make a gift to the city of Porvoo and came out with an idea of painting a city's best view. There is a hill across the river from the old part of the city and I made several photographs from there. The idea to make it big came as a surprise. We have bought a bunch of used office divisions recently. I was going to use them to build an office in our summer house. These are basically wooden frames, covered with a dense canvas and filled with soundproof material, standing on aluminum legs. So, 15 of these panels give a painting area of about 15 yards by 1 1/2 yard.

It took us, roughly, 6 months from start to finish. We made several trips to Porvoo to paint on the spot. If one panel weights about 12 kg, how much is the total weight ? No, it is much more than a Russian "Lada" (compact size car) can handle. It required a purchase of a trailer... Rain and snow don't improve a quality of an oil-based paintings. I wrapped in plastic every panel before we move them from place to place. We used about 5 kg. of oil paint and an enormous amount of brushes, thinner, lacquer and oil. In the end, our biggest room was circled by the paintings.

"Porvoo's Panorama" was on display in St.Petersburg Palace of Friendship during the celebrations of the Independence Day of Finland in December 1995.There is a sad end to this story though. The city administration of Porvoo didn't find a place to display these paintings. It was too big to be placed in any of their buildings. Now it sits in a corner of our friends' garage, waiting for us to come back.

"It's over, Marina !", and we are still alive"

Finnish consul and cultural attache in St.Petersburg

Finnish consul ... in St.Petersburg, cultural attache Anna-Maria Liukku, Marina

Without our friends Pekki and Margareta Bagge help the panorama would have never been made.

The resting place for Porvoo's panorama is in ... garage.
Is this a finale ?