Comana Landscape 1928

Vasile Popescu painted this landscape with oil on canvas using soft brushstrokes and a warm palette. I'm thinking about Vasile standing there, maybe a little sunburned, squinting at the light as he's mixing his colors. There's something about the way he's rendered the shapes, not quite cartoonish but definitely simplified, that makes me feel like he's trying to capture the feeling of the place as much as the appearance. The brushstrokes of the verdant field have this real energy, right? Like the paint is alive. Look at the architectural forms and the smokestack, which seem to pierce the sky like a dagger. This makes me think about the dialogue between man and nature, or the ways that painting can embrace ambiguity and uncertainty. I see echoes of other landscape painters here. Maybe he's thinking about Cezanne's structures or even the Fauvist use of color. It is through these connections and the ongoing conversation of painting that something new comes into being.