Autumn 1983

Mikhail Olennikov made this landscape painting, called ‘Autumn’, with oil on canvas. It’s a pretty big canvas, almost a meter wide. What strikes me is how he’s managed to capture the feeling of a specific place, probably somewhere he knew well. The paint handling is lovely, so fresh and intuitive. Look at the way he’s dabbed the paint on to suggest the foliage in the foreground, with those little yellow sun flowers, and the distant fields beyond, with their patchwork of browns and greens, dotted with tiny red and yellow dashes, like the roof tops of houses. It’s a celebration of the joy of colour. The whole surface of the painting is active, alive with marks. It reminds me a little of Milton Avery’s simplified landscapes, or maybe even some of Bonnard's less obviously domestic scenes. And just like those guys, Olennikov seems to suggest that painting is just as much about feeling as it is about seeing.