Black cat on a windowsill 1902

Konstantin Korovin built this image, Black Cat on a Windowsill, with loose brushstrokes and a bright palette, imagining the scene emerging stroke by stroke. I wonder, did he start with the cat, a dark, solid shape against the light, or maybe the light itself, capturing the way it floods the room? What would it have been like to stand there with him? Look at the paint, how it thickens in some areas, like the flowers, and thins in others, almost transparent in the shadows. Each touch feels deliberate yet spontaneous. The green of the table is almost sickly, sickly like a French Impressionist, and that cat! A dark smudge and a sentinel. Like other artists, Korovin probably grappled with the push and pull of representation and abstraction, trying to make sense of the world, one brushstroke at a time. Painting's an ongoing conversation, a way of speaking without words, where meaning is found in the making, and the looking, again and again.