A Winter Evening 1905

Julius Sergius Klever made "A Winter Evening" with oil paint, and it's like stepping into a dream of Russian winter, isn't it? The way he builds up the snow with these thick strokes, you can almost feel the crunch under your boots. It's really about the materiality of paint, the way it can conjure a whole world, not just depict one. Look at how the light catches on the bark of those birch trees, that contrast between the cool blues of the snow and the warm browns peeking through. It feels like he's scraping away the surface to reveal something underneath, both in the landscape and in the painting itself. There's a loneliness to it, but also a quiet beauty, like Caspar David Friedrich decided to take up residence in a snow globe. Klever's probably having a conversation with those romantic landscape painters, but he's doing it with his own particular accent, a kind of melancholic tenderness that feels both familiar and strange. Art, like winter, keeps coming back, but it's never quite the same, is it?