Portrait of songbeater futurist Wassily Kamensky 1916

David Burliuk made this painting of Wassily Kamensky with oils, and it's a wild ride of color and form. I love how Burliuk doesn’t hold back, slapping down paint with an almost reckless energy. Looking closely, you can see how the surface is built up with these staccato marks, like little jabs of pigment. The colors are earthy, sure, but they're also kind of electric, clashing and vibrating against each other. Check out the nude figure at the top, and how the colours almost look like an x-ray. There's this great tension between representation and abstraction, where things seem to be dissolving and reforming at the same time. Burliuk’s definitely got some Cézanne in him, or maybe a touch of Kirchner, but he's doing his own thing, pushing beyond mere influence into something that feels raw and untamed. It’s like he’s saying, "Art is a conversation, but I’m gonna shout my part!"