A Peasant Women 1904

Filipp Malyavin made this painting of peasant women, and it’s like watching a fire. I can imagine Malyavin, throwing paint at the canvas, trying to capture the inner lives of these figures. The surface is full of thick strokes, and the reds and oranges are almost overwhelming. The red feels less like a color and more like a force, wrapping the women in a cloak of shared intensity. I’m thinking about someone like Chaïm Soutine, who wrestled with paint until it screamed, but this is different. Malyavin isn’t trying to make paint suffer; he’s trying to make it sing. It's like he’s saying that being a peasant woman, being part of a community, is not a quiet thing. It's loud, and it's full of life. Painters like Malyavin and Soutine remind us that art is a conversation across time. It’s about seeing what others have done, and then trying to push it further. They're showing us how to feel, how to connect.