Peasant women at the market in Sofia 1903

Anton Mitov captured this scene of peasant women at the market in Sofia with what looks like nimble brushstrokes and a light palette. I like to imagine Mitov standing there, trying to get it all down, choosing which characters to include, how they relate. Look how the figures in the painting almost melt into one another. The edges are not very defined, right? The composition feels like a single, unified mass—a community. Maybe Mitov was thinking about Courbet, or some other realist painters? But this painting isn’t only concerned with realism, is it? It is also about the air that moves between all of these people and animals and goods on display. There are many different ways to build up a surface, and here Mitov has opted for loose and free, giving us a painting that hums with a sense of life. And that is what painting can do: not copy life, but breathe it.