Winter sun 1919

Konstantin Alexeevich Korovin captured this scene with oil on canvas, and wow, what a moment he seizes. See how the dominant gestural marks and limited colour palette bring this work into being, shifting and emerging through trial, error, and intuition? I sympathize with Korovin here, imagining what it might have been like to create this; what he might have been thinking when he made it. You can feel the materiality of the paint, the thick impasto creating texture, and the way the light bounces off the surface. The physicality of the medium shapes our experience of the painting. That one confident stroke describing the figure's arm? That communicates so much feeling, intention, and meaning. It relates to the Impressionist project of capturing fleeting moments, or to how someone like Bonnard uses light. It's all one big conversation across time, artists inspiring one another's creativity. Painting embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations over fixed readings.