After the storm 1921

Boris Kustodiev painted this landscape, After the Storm, with oils, and honestly, it’s just so nice to look at. The colors are super saturated – like, whoa, that rainbow! – and the marks are applied with real purpose. You can see the brushstrokes everywhere, like he’s not trying to hide the fact that this is paint on canvas, you know? There’s this sense of joy in the process of painting itself. Look at the way the dark blues of the stream contrast with the yellows of the field, the way that the smoke lingers on the horizon. This is what it feels like to be alive! I think it reminds me a little bit of some of the earlier landscapes of Gustav Klimt, where you get this real sense of the artist just reveling in the act of looking and painting. I feel like art should be like that – a conversation, a back-and-forth, rather than some kind of pronouncement from on high.