Green Grove 1990

Tetyana Yablonska made this painting of a green grove with oil on canvas, though when, I couldn’t tell you. It’s a really interesting thing, this green. When you look closer you see it's not just one green but loads of broken tones, applied wet on wet, building up the image from a kind of luminous mulch. There’s something almost Seurat-like in the way she’s put it together, so that from a distance the colours optically mix. I imagine she must have used small brushes, or perhaps even a palette knife, to achieve that textured surface. I like how she's let the strokes of paint sit on the surface, like a kind of code, or a map of her movements. You can almost feel her energy as she works. It reminds me a little of Klimt and the way he would layer paint to create depth and texture in his landscapes. Ultimately, this painting is a testament to the power of art to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary. It reminds us that beauty can be found in the simplest of things, if we take the time to really look.