Children in the Park 1940

Pyotr Konchalovsky's "Children in the Park" is a riot of greens, pinks, and whites, slathered onto the canvas with juicy, visible brushstrokes. I can almost feel him there, wrestling with the paint, trying to capture the fleeting light filtering through the trees. Imagine Konchalovsky, squinting at the scene, mixing his colors, dabbing and pushing the paint around, trying to find the balance between representation and pure, expressive mark-making. There is the very faintest line of a fence in the background, which the artist might have painted first. He is almost inviting the viewer to see the world through his eyes. Look at how the thick daubs of paint create the textures of leaves and flowers, how the colors vibrate against each other. A painter is always in conversation with other painters, taking cues, reacting against, and pushing the language of painting forward. Konchalovsky, in his own way, converses with the impressionists and post-impressionists who came before him, but with a distinctly Russian accent. Painting is embodied expression, an ongoing, open-ended dialogue. There’s no right or wrong, just a constant search, an endless process of seeing and feeling.