Spring day 1929

Martiros Sarian made this painting of a spring day, sometime in the middle of his life. I imagine him outside with his easel, wrestling with how to get all that sky and mountain down onto the canvas. The colors are so joyful, greens, browns, with touches of red and white and those mountains are dreamy. Look how he’s built up the paint, thick in some places, especially on the horizon, and thinner in others, like the foreground, letting the canvas breathe. See that bold stroke of white for the blossoming tree? It’s like a burst of light, almost childlike in its directness. You can see echoes of Cézanne in the way Sarian breaks down the landscape into planes of color. There’s also something uniquely his, a kind of vibrant optimism that makes you feel good. It reminds me to think of painting as a conversation across time, each artist responding to those who came before.