Peasant with a Rake 1937

Sasza Blonder, who was born in Poland, painted this landscape with oil on canvas, sometime between 1909 and 1949. Look at the way the paint is applied in thick, expressive strokes. I imagine Blonder building up the surface, one layer at a time, maybe even using a palette knife. It feels like he’s trying to capture not just the look of the landscape, but the feeling of it. I can almost feel the weight of the mountains in the distance and the vastness of the sky. The way he’s rendered the figure of the peasant with a rake is so gestural, so economical—just a few strokes of paint, and you get a sense of a person at work in the fields. It reminds me a little of Van Gogh, or maybe even some of the early Fauves. I imagine he must have been looking at their work and thinking about how to use color and brushwork to convey emotion. Painters are always in conversation with one another, riffing off each other’s ideas, pushing the boundaries of what painting can do. Each stroke is a gesture, a moment of decision, a record of the artist’s presence.