Portrait of writer Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev on a yacht 1912

Ilya Repin made this portrait of the writer Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev on a yacht in 1912. The way Repin builds the image, layer by layer, reminds me that painting is always a process. Look at the surface of the painting. See how the thick brushstrokes create a kind of choppy texture, almost like the sea itself? The paint is applied with such physicality, you can almost feel the artist wrestling with the canvas. The blues and whites of the sky and water bleed into one another, creating a sense of movement and instability. Then there is the dark belt around the writer's waist, it almost looks like a horizon line, grounding him in the midst of all this turbulence. Repin makes me think of Courbet, who also wasn’t afraid to show the messy, material reality of paint. Both artists seem to embrace the idea that art is not about capturing a perfect likeness, but about exploring the world through the act of painting itself.