Flowers and Seashells in a Mountain Landscape 1951

Curator: What a wildly wonderful painting. This is David Burliuk’s “Flowers and Seashells in a Mountain Landscape," painted in 1951. A vibrant, unexpected combination of acrylic and impasto. It practically bounces with color. What do you make of it? Editor: My first thought is defiance. A challenge to conventional landscape, and even still life painting. It's almost aggressively joyful in its colour palette. Curator: Yes! The sheer exuberance gets me. The sunflowers reach like mad toward the sky, those shell are just tossed to the side there on that hill--or a table?--and the mountain range... it’s barely a suggestion. Do you read anything into that? Editor: Absolutely. Consider Burliuk's biography. He was, after all, deeply affected by the politics of his time. We have an avant-garde artist who emigrated from Ukraine to the US. So these playful seashells gain new dimensions. Curator: They’re almost little refugees, stranded on this vibrantly hued, somewhat alien landscape. What do you make of that vivid but odd choice of colour? That bright blue that almost feels artificial under all the pastoral trappings? Editor: Perhaps that electric blue symbolises displacement, or a new environment. It is striking how that mountain, which looms behind the flowers, isn’t stable—or at least not as the flower vase in the centre. What about the tension between what could be construed as 'high art,' represented by oil painting and traditional landscapes, and more 'domestic' elements such as a vase of flowers? Curator: Ooh, good point! The flowers are nature tamed, artful, while the mountain resists easy definition. Even its reflection, down near the foreground. Almost as if to say nature laughs in the face of our human desire for mastery and perfection. This painting is more of a declaration. Editor: Exactly! It feels radical and brave even to this day. The tension between all these seemingly familiar figures opens into much richer socio-political analysis if we view them from Burliuk's historical experience as a Ukrainian migrant. Curator: Well, you’ve certainly bloomed where you were planted today, with some fine, insightful perspective! I’ll never look at a handful of flowers and a pretty mountain landscape quite the same way again. Editor: And for me, a good reminder of the politics always rumbling beneath ostensibly placid surfaces!