Quay in Ryazan 1931

Pyotr Konchalovsky’s "Quay in Ryazan" is a landscape of soft, almost pastel colours, somewhere between figuration and…something else! Imagine Konchalovsky outside, in the snow perhaps, with a vision of a world built out of tactile sensations: the gritty feel of the paint, the resistance of the brush on the canvas, the biting cold air… He’s made a few decisive moves here. Look at the way the pink of the church rhymes with the pinky peach in the sky. And see how he balances this sweetness with that earthy, chunky foreground. It’s like a seesaw, isn’t it? Maybe he’s thinking about the way the eye moves, or the way the painting can hold both weight and light. It’s a dance of sorts, a conversation between what he sees and what he feels. I can imagine him thinking about Cezanne or Matisse, but also about something very Russian, very much his own. That’s the thing about painting, isn’t it? We're all standing on each other’s shoulders, trying to see a little further.