I believe that artistic appreciation is good for the soul. It helps us to develop sensitivity and “taste”. So, this is why we include works by famous artists on the blog. A few of us also participate in “Art in Bloom” and these works may hone our thinking capacity for how we might translate a piece into a design.
With this in mind, we will be looking at winterscapes from various landscape artists over the chilly season. Or other non-landscape artists but with winter themes.
Since I have to mine media from the public commons (that is, not under copyright) I find that there aren’t as many American artists included. One gets a bit fatigued of using the same ones. So, here we are introduced to a Russian artist of the realistic style, Vasily Polenov. (Remember, you can click on almost all blog pictures to enlarge them.)
A native of St. Petersburg, Polenov studied under Pavel Chistyakov and at the Imperial Academy of Arts from 1863 to 1871.
In the late 1870s, Polenov concentrated on painting landscapes in the realist tradition of Aleksey Savrasov and Fyodor Vasilyev. He attempted to impart the silent poetry of Russian nature, related to daily human life.
He was one of the first Russian artists who achieved a plein air freshness of color combined with artistic finish of composition (The Moscow courtyard, 1878; The Grandmother’s garden, 1878; Overgrown pond, 1879). The principles developed by Polenov had a great impact on the further development of Russian (and especially Soviet) landscape painting.
(per Wikipedia)
