Heated tiles 1983

Yuriy Khymych’s “Heated Tiles” is a landscape painting, made with oil on canvas. Look at how Khymych lays down these thick, juicy colors, kind of arbitrary but somehow they really work! You can almost feel him mixing each color as he goes, responding to the painting itself. Check out the hill shapes and the way they roll towards us. The paint is put on fairly smoothly, but you can still see some texture in the brushstrokes. Look at the orange-red roofs against the cooler blues of the buildings. This creates such a cool contrast that your eye just bounces around the image. The dark, almost black outlines give the composition a graphic, print-like quality. This reminds me a bit of Milton Avery, another artist who could do so much with just a few shapes and colors. Ultimately, it’s the way that this painter handles color and simplifies forms to capture a place and mood in his very own distinctive voice.