White Nights 1922

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky made this landscape, *White Nights*, using ink, and you can really see the process in the final image. The stark contrast between the white of the paper and the heavy black ink reminds me of printmaking, where the artist carves away at a surface to reveal an image. There’s this wonderful tension between detail and abstraction, especially in the rendering of the water and the reflections of the buildings. It’s almost like a Rorschach test, where the simple lines invite our minds to fill in the gaps. The railing is a great example of this; the heavy, blocky forms are reduced to their essence, yet they carry the weight of the entire composition. Thinking about other artists, this reminds me of the work of Piranesi, the way he used line to create these grand, almost theatrical spaces. But where Piranesi’s work is about scale and drama, Dobuzhinsky’s is more intimate, a quiet moment captured with a few well-placed strokes. It’s a beautiful reminder that sometimes, less really is more.