Composition on Kuindzhi’s painting “Sunspots on the hoarfrost”


Kuindzhi was called the singer of space and light. He restored the landscape to an ecstatic sense of beauty and extraordinaryness of the world. “The illusion of light was his god, and there was no artist equal to him in achieving this miracle of painting.” Kuinji is an artist of light, “Repin wrote in 1913.

“Some are able to write even dirt on the road, but is that realism?” said Kuinji, studying the light of the moon.

Kuindzhi study of the air environment led to a good result – he significantly enriched his palette and developed a specific decorative vision. His image did not separate objects, but, on the contrary, combined in the addition of new decorative brightness and color.

A characteristic trend towards decorativeness began in the winter landscapes of Kuindzhi, dating from the 1880s. In these works, the artist continued his search for a romantic idiom embodied in a decorative visual system that included enhanced color, light silhouette, complex contour execution, etc. “Decorative Wave” represents the main trend in the artist’s work in the so-called “silent period” .

Decorative findings in Kuinji’s paintings were associated with his study of the plein air of winter nature. In these works, the real effect of snow-covered forests and colored shadows was achieved by a soft, twisty sketch and highlighted the color shades. The peak of these findings was a small picture of “Moonlight spots in the forest.” Winter (1898-1908). Here, nature is illuminated by an unearthly radiance – an impression resulting from the intensified brightness of the natural lunar color, which seems to mix the fires of two worlds, real, lunar, and unreal, as if emerging from some cosmic source.


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Composition on Kuindzhi’s painting “Sunspots on the hoarfrost”