The woman reading in the garden 1903

Yeghishe Tadevosyan made this painting of a woman reading in the garden with oil paint and what looks like a whole lot of looking, and seeing, and feeling. The marks are small and discrete, built up of tiny dabs of color, like Seurat, but with less rigor and more… I don’t know… tenderness? You can almost feel the sun on your skin looking at the painting, like the artist was trying to capture not just what he saw, but how it felt to be there. There is a lovely light filtering through the trees in the background. The color is really beautiful here, it’s like he took the green of the grass and the blue of the sky and smeared them together on the canvas. It feels, somehow, very modern, like Pierre Bonnard, who was also interested in capturing the fleeting moments of everyday life, but more than that, the sensation of those moments. The ambiguity of it all.