The Roháče Mountains 1933

Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan made this pastel drawing of The Roháče Mountains, and you can almost feel the scratchy, immediate joy he must have felt as he built up the image. I can imagine the artist standing there, squinting, probably cold, quickly capturing the jagged forms. What a stark contrast of colours! Raw sienna, ochre, and burnt umber on the horizon, and then this cool contrast of olive green and cobalt blue. It feels immediate, capturing the essence of the mountains rather than precise details. The texture of the pastel on paper gives it a raw, unfinished quality, like a sketch from life. There's a real freedom in those marks, especially in the way he's scribbled in the foliage. It reminds me of other landscape painters, like Cezanne, who were also trying to capture the essence of a place through colour and form. Artists are constantly inspired by each other, building on what came before.