Landscape from Baia Mare 1937

Petre Abrudan painted this landscape from Baia Mare, sometime in the mid-20th century, probably in oil. Look at the way he used colour here, the red-pink earth against the muted greens and browns. It’s like he's making colour do all the work to describe the scene. The paint is applied with a kind of casual directness, you can see these individual brushstrokes that build up the image. I particularly love how the foreground path is rendered, those strokes of peachy pink give it such a soft, inviting feel. Then your eye travels up, past the tree trunks, to the building in the background. It’s like a journey through colour. This reminds me a bit of some of Milton Avery’s landscapes, that same kind of simplified, almost flattened perspective. But Abrudan brings his own sensibility to it, a certain rawness that makes it feel fresh and alive. With paintings like this, there's no right way to see it. It's about letting the colours and forms spark something in you.