Description of nature from the paintings of Shishkin and Levitan


Love painting, poets!

Only she is given

Souls changeable signs

Transfer to the canvas!

N. Zabolotsky

Love painting… In my opinion, the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky addresses not so much to poets as to us, ordinary people. For on this mortal land there are only two worlds, where the soul rests from all sorts of troubles, revives, enriches, finds wings. It’s music and painting. Picturesque canvases happily excite me, especially if they depict nature and especially if they are canvases of Levitan and Shishkin.

… The dense northern forests surround Yelabuga, the birthplace of Shishkin. As a boy he fell in love with the forest and spent most of his adult life in the woods, “hunting” with the album and pencil for “nature”.

Most often in his paintings depicts a pine forest. Slender, proud giants, throwing their bright green hats into the sky, are perceived as a symbol of tranquility and strength. The forest

and drags you into its jungle, although everything starts from a clearing on the outskirts of a mighty forest. But whether the August moss, or a shallow stream, suddenly jumped into the thicket, or the boron itself, something hiding somewhere inside, all beckons into the forest depths and promises an amazing mystery. She is there, behind these tall ship pines.

And here are a few pines in the rye. Favorite Shishkin pines. Here they are different than in the painting “Ship Grove”. There they shoulder to shoulder, and now they have to. single take the blows of the wind. Some – lose branches, others – crowns. But still they have been standing for many years, powerful, slender. And although this picture is called “Rye”, in my opinion, it is still about the pines.

Looking at any of Shishkin’s paintings, I seem to hear the voice of this mighty artist: “I found this wonderful corner of nature – rejoice, and you to him.” What could be better than the forest, the fields are what they are, they do not need to be embellished, they are beautiful themselves by

oneself”.

Perfect on their own… March… The first steps of spring. On the canvas again the usual landscape: a mixed forest, a snowy meadow, a corner of the house with a porch, a horse harnessed to a sleigh. But then the spring, unbearably bright sun flares up, and the picture is filled with warmth, light, ordinary objects are clothed in a shaky shell. I feel this gentle, misty shell on all landscape canvases of Levitan: about the March snow, about the spring birches, about the magnificent nature wilting. This is a special Levitanian intimacy in the perception of nature, subtle lyricism, humanization of nature. A great Russian artist knows how to create not only a true image of nature, but everything that a person experiences, admiring the holiday of autumn or spring. I really think these pictures are festive. In their colors, joyful, major tunes sound. Man, as in the pictures of Shishkin, on the canvases of Levitan we do not see. But he is invisibly present. Here is the horse waiting for the master, here is the open door and the shutter shot from the window. All these details make the Levitanian corner of the March nature cozy and inhabited. All the breadth and power of the Russian landscape, so visibly represented in Shishkin’s paintings, is only guessed at the thin trunks of the “Levitan” birches.

But there are these different artists, in my opinion, one common feature. No, not love of nature, but a huge love for it. And so the most ingenious motive in their paintings grows to a large poetic work.


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Description of nature from the paintings of Shishkin and Levitan