Water-Carrier at Krzemieniec 1936

Sasza Blonder made this painting of Krzemieniec with a brush loaded with colour. Look at the weight of those strokes! I can imagine Blonder outside, squinting, trying to pick out the colours of the buildings in the town—that peachy orange, the dusty pink, the light grey of the sky. It must have been a challenge to create a sense of depth and space with such a limited palette. But he’s done it! There's a rhythm to the repetition of colours. The composition is built from these blocks of colour, like tiles in a mosaic. I wonder if Blonder was thinking about the work of other painters when he made this? There's something of Cezanne in the way he's broken down the scene into its component parts. You get the feeling that artists like Blonder are in an ongoing conversation, using colour and form to explore new ways of seeing the world.