Autumn 1918

This is Boris Kustodiev’s painting, Autumn, and it gives you such a strong sense of time and place. I can almost smell the damp leaves! Look how those strokes of muted gold and russet capture the melancholy of late autumn. Painting is a lot about capturing the time of day, isn't it? You have to imagine the artist there, mixing those earthy tones, trying to nail that fleeting light, trying to find a way of expressing time passing. I love how the bare branches reach up as if they're trying to grab the last bit of warmth from the sky. The scene is quiet, contemplative. I wonder if Kustodiev was thinking about mortality as he made it? The way that colors shift in the autumn, and the way we change too. The muted colors speak to me of the inevitability of change, of the beauty that lies within decay, and ultimately, the ongoing cycle of life and death that connects us. Like other painters, Kustodiev is just thinking about existence and how we can know it.