Morning in Stavrin 1909

This is Martiros Sarian’s ‘Morning in Stavrin’, and it feels like it was almost excavated rather than painted, like it was found fully formed in the earth. Look at that blue, and those earthen reds! I can imagine Sarian, squinting into the light, working fast, trying to capture the essence of the place. He probably worked intuitively, making something up as he went along, adding and subtracting, smearing and scraping until he landed on the right balance of form and color. See the way the dog on the right is barely there? How the building has that gold trim? That is a painter thinking! The color makes me think of other painters working in that in-between space of representation and abstraction. This feels like Marsden Hartley almost, but also Milton Avery –that weird simplification of shape, and the balance of color relationships. All artists are magpies, borrowing and lending and evolving the language of painting through their own touch.