Lumière Sur La Plaine 1962

Alexis Gritchenko made 'Lumière Sur La Plaine' with paint and probably a brush, maybe even a palette knife—who knows? The overall palette is soft, bathed in that pale light of somewhere sunny, maybe Mediterranean. Look at those strokes! They're kind of broken, dabbed on, like he’s trying to catch the light flickering across the landscape. You can almost feel the warmth of the sun and the gentle breeze. I bet Gritchenko was out there, squinting, trying to nail down the colors and the forms as the light shifted. Painting is a weird act of translation, you know? Taking what you see and feel and turning it into something else, something tangible. I find myself wondering who influenced Gritchenko. He's part of a conversation, a lineage of painters stretching back, all wrestling with the same problems. They teach each other new ways of seeing. It's like, the more you look, the more you see, and the more the painting starts to talk back to you.