Night at the seaside 1903

Konstantin Bogaevsky made this oil painting, Night at the Seaside, with a darkly muted palette and gestural strokes, as though he were trying to capture a fleeting memory. I can imagine him wrestling with the canvas, trying to pin down the roiling energy of the waves. The paint application is wonderfully thick, lending the image a tactile, almost sculptural quality. Look at the lower left of the image, you can really see how the dark pigment has been layered to build up craggy rocks against the churning water. It reminds me of Courbet's seascapes, but with an added touch of the fantastical. I wonder what Bogaevsky was thinking about as he painted this scene? Perhaps the precariousness of life, the constant push and pull between land and sea? It's as if he was in conversation with all the painters who have tried to capture nature's brute force over the years. Paintings like this one remind me that art is a conversation across time. Each artist responds to those who came before, and in the process, expands our sense of what painting can do.