The Garden in Sochi 1941

Arshile Gorky made this painting, The Garden in Sochi, with oil on canvas using a palette of olive green, blues, yellows, and whites. You can see the hand of the artist, can't you? I can imagine Gorky working on this, maybe unsure where it was heading, adding a bit here, then there, trying to capture the essence of something, some place, some feeling… The olive green kind of dominates, and it’s the color of the ground from which the other forms emerge. Look at the biomorphic shapes floating around; they are like characters in a play. I see a dash of red, a dab of purple, and notice how the brushstrokes vary from thin lines to more loaded marks. There’s a lot of white space around the blue shape; maybe he stopped there, not wanting to overwork it. I know that feeling. Gorky was part of a generation of painters who were constantly looking at each other's work; Picasso, Miro, and Leger, were all part of his world, and he was in conversation with them all. What I love about painting is that it’s not about answers; it’s about the questions, and Gorky asks so many interesting ones here.