Still Life. Oranges and crumpled paper. 1946

Pyotr Konchalovsky made this painting, a still life with oranges and crumpled paper, with oil on canvas. I'm trying to imagine Konchalovsky, standing in front of this arrangement, maybe tweaking it, you know, moving an orange a bit to the left, shifting the paper this way and that to make the composition just right. The green of the cloth, it’s not just green, is it? It's got these hints of yellow and blue, like he was mixing it right there on the canvas, wet into wet. And the oranges, those luscious oranges – some are peeking out of their papery wrappings. The paint is applied with these decisive strokes. I feel a connection to him and a sense of kinship with other artists throughout time, capturing something essential about the world, and then trying to put that into paint.