Turning to the theme of productive labour, so important to painting in the 1920s and 1930s, Boris Tsvetkov creates a series of works entitled Timber Harvesting, which includes Heated Basin and Log Conveyors. Having chosen a relatively unusual theme, the artist finds an effective vantage point — a bird’s eye view — allowing him to construct a diagonal composition that corresponds logically to the dynamics of the situation, while the style itself favours sharp contours. The name of the painting indicates the nature of the process being depicted. The heated basin serves to warm the timber so that it can be better milled, while a mechanised device — a log conveyor — moves the logs onto the shopfloor. The group working with the hitches, the starting point for the industrial process, is also the central visual and conceptual centre of the painting as well. The entire composition is permeated with the bright light of a frosty winter day and an atmosphere of optimistic and fruitful labour, a characteristic common to Soviet painting of that era.