Comana Landscape 1928

Vasile Popescu made this landscape painting of Comana with oil on canvas. The brushwork here is so upfront. I mean, you can really see how the paint has been applied. It's as if the artist is saying, "Hey, look, this is paint, and I'm using it to make something." I'm drawn to the way Popescu handles the greens in the foreground. Notice that kind of broken color, where he's dabbling different shades of green next to each other. It’s not blended perfectly, so your eye does the work of mixing. Up close, those marks are so distinct, but when you step back, they magically become fields and trees. There’s this tension between abstraction and representation that’s really engaging. It reminds me a bit of Cezanne, actually, that same interest in structure and form, but with a touch more warmth, maybe a Romanian sensibility. Ultimately, painting is about how we see and experience the world, and there are always new ways of looking to discover.