Arable 1917

Boris Kustodiev made this painting, Arable, with oil paint, and what strikes me is how alive the paint feels. You can almost see him outdoors, squinting in the sun. I imagine him standing there, trying to wrangle the bigness of the landscape, into something handheld. The ground is not just brown, it’s lavender, and beige, and ochre – a true playground of mark-making. I particularly like the way he renders the trees on the right. They're not simply green; they're explosions of blues, greens, and browns, kind of scribbled down, capturing the essence of foliage without getting bogged down in detail. There’s something so free in that gesture, like he is trying to capture what it *feels* like to be in that place. It reminds me of other landscape painters who are unafraid to dive into the sensory experience of being in nature and I wonder if he looked at their paintings, too. It’s just this lovely conversation, across time, of how to capture a feeling.