Morning in Stavrin 1909

Martiros Sarian made this painting, Morning in Stavrin, with oil on canvas. The colour palette is pretty simple and straightforward, which makes it kind of fascinating, right? Like, he's not trying to blind you with a million shades; instead, he is thinking about the whole process of painting. Look at the surface texture of the canvas, it looks a little rough. It’s like the paint has been pushed around, layered, and maybe even scraped back in places. You can almost feel the physicality of the medium, as if the paint itself is a kind of character in the scene. I love the way he has rendered the animal figures, it’s not really about what they are it’s more about how they make the composition work. They feel like the other shapes in the painting, the houses and the trees. Sarian is like a precursor to Milton Avery in the way he simplified his forms, but the flattened shapes and earthy colours also recall some of the landscapes made by Paul Gauguin in Tahiti. It reminds us that art is always an exchange of ideas.