Evening in the mountains 1932

Martiros Sarian made this oil painting of a mountain evening, and you can see how he’s really working the surface of the canvas. He’s using color to build form, laying down these strokes of warm yellows and oranges, and cool greens and blues to suggest the shapes of hills and sky. It’s all about the process, you know? The act of applying paint, of letting the colors interact, that's where the magic happens. Look at the texture here – you can almost feel the bristles of Sarian’s brush as he drags the paint across the canvas. And those dark, jagged lines, maybe shadows, maybe something else entirely! They remind me a bit of Milton Avery. Sarian is exploring the edge of representation, suggesting a landscape that feels both familiar and dreamlike. He isn't telling us what to see, instead, he's inviting us to get lost in the ambiguity of the image.