Mountain landscape with trees. Ortolan. 1935

Konstantin Bogaevsky made this landscape painting with trees and mountains with watercolor and pencil. Bogaevsky approaches landscape like he's building a stage set, or maybe a memory palace. He is letting the forms emerge slowly, building layer on layer. Look how thinly the paint is applied. You can see the paper peeking through everywhere. I love how the clouds are just suggested. It's like they might disappear any second. In the foreground, the slender tree trunks have an almost calligraphic quality, like he’s writing the landscape rather than depicting it. Bogaevsky has a light touch, using pale greens and browns to build a sense of depth. Everything feels muted and dreamlike. It's a little sad, but mostly very beautiful. This feels like a bridge between Romantic landscape painters like Caspar David Friedrich, and later abstraction, where the gesture becomes more important than the image. It reminds me a little of Charles Burchfield's landscapes, or even Milton Avery. Like them, Bogaevsky finds a way to suggest deep feeling, without getting sentimental or overworked.