Farmer, spread out on canvas 1917

Zinaida Serebriakova made this image, Farmer, on canvas, and you can see that the brush has really danced across the surface. It looks like the farmer is on the ground, and from the image, you can almost hear the sounds of the countryside. I am trying to imagine Serebriakova actually making it, maybe she was right there in the field, trying to capture this woman doing her work. There's a kind of beautiful, relaxed quality to her pose, and I can see the artist really noticed her clothes, and her red headscarf against the blues and reds of her clothes. You can see these expressive lines against the raw canvas. In other paintings, Serebriakova made incredible portraits of her family, and I think she was really interested in the character of the everyday. Like Morisot and Cassatt, she made the private world public. It reminds me that we’re all artists trying to figure things out together.