Rzannikov Mikhail was born into a peasant family. From the age of 13 he started working, graduated from the technical college in Sverdlovsk and was sent to work at the Tube plant in Lipetsk, where he worked until his retirement. He turned to painting in the mid-1970s: once he painted a watercolor landscape a bedsheet on a bet with his wife. Subsequently, he studied at the Lipetsk club of amateur artists, where he mastered the basics of painting techniques. He started exhibiting his works at a regional exhibition in 1980-1981.
Most of Rzhannikov’s works are devoted to nature of the Chusovaya River – the places of his childhood s well as the portraits of his neighbours and relatives. Every year, going on vacation to the Urals, he took these portraits as gifts to his relatives, thus staying connected with his native sad city. Rzhannikov is also a master of still-lifes, in which he expresses his idea of the fullness of life. Many of the fruit that he has portrayed were grown in his own garden. Noteworthy are his hunting scenes made by memories or stories heard in his childhood and two versions of the composition «The Triumph of a Veteran» (1994, 1998). As well as his earlier portraits of Lenin and Stalin, this picture expresses the artist’s political credo that fully complies with to the basics of Soviet ideology. His mastery of the Soviet ceremonial portrait is clearly seen both in self-portraits and in depicting relatives, including his little granddaughter. Sometimes, Rzhannikov accidentally creates an image of his time, just like, for example, in his picture ”Returning from haymaking and hunting” (1991), where along the street with skewed village houses there go far from perfect collective farmers with scythes (a triple image of death with a scythe is offered for experienced spectators). They are accompanied by a yellow dog with an unkind grin. And in the foreground, in the middle of the street, as is often the case for rural areas, there is a fenced monument to the victims of the war with a flower bed with flowers planted in a red-star pattern on a yellow background and a bench.
Rzhannikov paints with bright striking colours, his figures and perspective are rather characteristic for the primitive style. His works, even bouquets of flowers, always feature a kind of rigidity, and even cruelty. Even tourists with tents or a half-nude gardener in huis own white-coloured garden look like gloomy characters in the life drama of Rzhanikov. At the same time, he was rather a cheerful, curious and cheerful person in real life. The artist participated in numerous regional and republican exhibitions.
