Winter 1942

Ivan Generalic made this winter scene in an unknown year, with an unknown medium, but the colours are earthy and honest. I can feel the artist's hand moving carefully across the canvas. The wooden structures and snowy rooftops, how they must have emerged slowly through intuition and meticulous detail. I wonder if Ivan stepped outside his studio and really looked at the snow, taking a moment to be still and to consider the simple, unadorned quality of life? Like the American painter Milton Avery, Ivan seems to have paid close attention to the ordinary to allow it to emerge in unexpected ways. The paint looks thin, as if stained into the weave. The texture, combined with the muted palette, gives the work an almost dreamlike quality, as if the scene exists in a space between memory and imagination. The way the artist renders the trees, bare and reaching, reminds me of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s landscapes—a kinship across time. It’s as if artists are forever in a conversation, influencing and echoing each other’s visions.