In the Room. Winter 1915

Boris Kustodiev made this painting, ‘In the Room. Winter’, with oil on canvas, and well, it feels like such a domestic scene. There’s something about the way he lays down the paint, kinda thin and washy, that makes the whole image feel light and airy, almost like a watercolor. The color palette, a mix of soft greens, yellows, and blues, adds to this sense of calm and quiet. It's like you can feel the cold seeping in from outside, but the warmth of the room keeps it at bay. Look at the wall behind the woman arranging flowers, and how the vertical stripes are broken up by these loose, sketchy strokes. It's like he's not trying to create a perfect illusion of reality, but rather capture the feeling of light and texture in the room. Which in turn makes me think of Vuillard, both these artists have this way of collapsing the space between the figures and the room, creating a sense of intimacy. It is this blending of the real and the unreal that makes art so damn interesting, don’t you think?