Tsar Dadon military 1909

Konstantin Alexeevich Korovin made this drawing of Tsar Dadon with pencil and watercolour, and it feels like the act of painting itself was an enquiry into Dadon's character, shifting and emerging through intuition. I can imagine Korovin sympathizing with Dadon, thinking about his heavy armour and spear, wondering what it might have been like to carry such weight. The surface is built up with layers of hatching which shape our experience of the figure. There is something about the purple shadows under the gold armour that make me think of other Russian painters, like Mikhail Vrubel, who were interested in the expressiveness of colour. Artists are always in conversation, exchanging ideas across time, inspiring each other’s creativity. This drawing is a form of embodied expression that embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations.