Winter on the Baikal. Turk 1991

Mikhail Olennikov made this painting, Winter on the Baikal. Turk, with oil on canvas. The overall palette is cool, muted, and dreamy—icy blues, grays, and whites. Olennikov worked the paint wet-on-wet, building the scene through layers of blended strokes. You can almost feel the chill in the air and the dampness of the snow! Imagine him standing there, working quickly to capture the fleeting light and the movement of the water. What was it like for Olennikov to stand in the cold, to try and capture such a scene? I wonder, too, about the influence of Russian landscape painters on his work, those artists who so beautifully captured the vastness and melancholy of the natural world. The brushwork is loose, almost gestural, but it manages to convey a sense of depth and space. Painting, like memory, always involves a translation of the original experience, and, here, Olennikov embraces the ambiguity and uncertainty of the painting process.