State Farm in Balaclava 1929

Pyotr Konchalovsky made this watercolor sketch of a farm in Balaclava, with strokes of diluted color swimming across the paper, sometime in the early twentieth century. Imagine him outside, quickly capturing the landscape, squinting to get the scene down, the light just so. I feel his delight in mark-making, in getting something down quickly. The image flickers in the artist's hand: dark horizontal strokes run across the bottom of the page, which I read as the parched earth in the foreground. The eye travels up the page to take in the buildings in the mid-ground, and a pale-blue sky above. It's like the artist has caught a fleeting impression of the landscape on a hot, bright day. I wonder if Konchalovsky knew the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. This piece reminds me of their love for the material qualities of paint, and a desire to capture the ephemeral, to record the sensory impression of a particular moment in time. Artists are always looking at each other and seeing what's possible!