Winter on the Baikal. Turk 1991

Mikhail Olennikov made this painting, Winter on the Baikal. Turk, with oil on canvas. The painting style here is all about gesture. Olennikov builds his scene with individual brushstrokes and dabs of paint. You can almost see the way he moved his hand to make each mark, so that the process feels really visible. The texture of the paint is also interesting, and you can see how certain marks are applied more thickly, almost like impasto. These heavier areas of paint catch the light and create a sense of depth and dimension, particularly in the way the ice is rendered. The color palette is quite muted, mostly blues, greens, and whites, which captures the coldness of winter on the Baikal. But then, there are these unexpected spots of warm color, like the peach and orange hues right in the centre which peek through the snow. Olennikov’s work has a similar atmosphere to that of Isaac Levitan, another Russian landscape painter known for his melancholic scenes of nature. However, there’s something about the directness and simplicity of Olennikov’s approach that feels very personal, a way of embracing the unpredictable side of painting.