Before the Storm (Village Neskuchnoye) 1911

Zinaida Serebriakova captured this landscape with watercolor, likely en plein air. Look how the stark, vertical lines of the tree trunks create a screen, almost like bars, against the approaching storm. I can almost feel the artist standing there, trying to capture the fleeting light before the downpour. You can see the urgency in the brushstrokes, the way the colors blend and bleed into each other, especially the olive greens, yellows, and grays. She's grappling with the weather, trying to pin down the feeling of a moment that's about to vanish. I wonder if she felt exposed to the elements, just like these stark trees? Did the wind threaten to blow the paper away? I think of other artists, like the Impressionists, and the way they similarly chased after light and atmosphere. There’s this lineage, you know, of painters wrestling with the ephemeral. Each of them trying to seize that ungraspable moment with a brush and some pigment.