Description of the painting "February Blue" by I. Grabar

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

They say that a landscape is a portrait of nature. And in a good artist, he is full of dynamism, a kind of mystery that is revealed to the viewer only on an intuitive-sensory level. He observes an ordinary, even unremarkable sketch of nature - a lonely tree standing, a turbulent sea or a mountainous area - and yet he never ceases to admire the unusual angle of the depicted, the photographically accurately noticed mood, the impressionistic play with colors. All these features can also characterize the canvases of Igor Grabar. Let's try to give a description of the painting "February Blue".

History of Creation

As a rule, evidence of the history of the creation of a work of art is extremely short-lived. Some time passes - and the artist himself does not remember exactly when he had the idea to capture something onpaper. Fortunately, the story of the painting "February Blue" has not sunk into oblivion. It is known that the canvas was created when Grabar was visiting Dugino with the hospitable philanthropist Nikolai Meshcherin. The Dugin period is considered perhaps the most fruitful in the artist's work, the paintings painted over 13 years were accepted by museums and exhibitions with pleasure.

One fine February morning, the artist just decided to take a walk - without paints and an easel. One of the birches seemed to Grabar especially beautiful, he stared at it and … dropped his stick. And picking it up, he looked at the tree from the bottom up. The effect was simply extraordinary! The artist rushed for supplies and sketched what he saw in order to start creating a full-fledged picture in a few days. To do this, Grabar dug a trench in the snow, covered the canvas with an umbrella, which enhanced the effect of the presence of blue, and began to create. He worked for about two weeks, and all this time nature spoiled the artist with beautiful weather.

Picture subject

Description of the painting "February Blue" let's start with the main thing - birches in the foreground. The tree is wrapped in the finest winter lace that can sparkle cheerfully even on a cloudy day. A little further you can see the smaller girlfriends of the white-barreled queen, small birch trees. So the comparison with the girls who are spinning in a round dance, calling spring and seeing off February comes to mind. It seems that if you stay a little longer next to the canvas, you will hear a song about the symbol of our country, the birch.

The tree is depicted against the background of a snow-white blanket and a piercing blue sky. That is why its branches, which give the birch an interesting, even somewhat strange shape, look mysterious, fabulous, bewitched. As if the white-trunked beauty has just woken up and reaches for the sky to welcome spring, which makes it seem that the birch is akimbo.

Color solution

We continue the essay "Description of the painting "February Blue"". It would seem that the image of the winter month requires the use of white paint with might and main. However, Grabar acted differently. On the canvas, the viewer can clearly see that the snow is no longer very clean, in some places thawed patches are visible, which means that spring is approaching. At the same time, the artist generously uses pastel and bright colors. It is believed that in the canvas he reached the limit of color saturation, painting, in fact, with pure light. We will see many shades of blue, ultramarine. All of them merge into the unique music of painting, the main purpose of which is to convey one more moment from the life of nature, sometimes invisible to the common man. With a similar installation, the canvas created by Grabar - "February Blue" - approaches the masterpieces of French impressionists, such as "Poppies" by Claude Monet.

Dominant mood

The main ideological message of the canvas can be described as an expectation. The winter cold will surely give way to warm weather, the depicted birch will dress in a beautiful outfit of green leaves, and nature will begin a new round of its development. This explains the extraordinary, optimisticemotional background of the canvas. This description of the painting "February Blue" should take into account.

Other Facts

Grabar has gained fame as a depicter of the winter season. There is even an interesting parallel of the mentioned Dugin period with Pushkin's Boldin autumn as one of the most fruitful periods of the poet's activity. However, Grabar - "February Blue" and other "winter" canvases do not count! - He also captured other seasons, as well as people's faces. The artist has worked very fruitfully throughout his life: not every painter can create almost non-stop for about 60 years!

Initially, the artist called the painting we are interested in “Blue Winter” – an analogy with other paintings by Grabar – but when he gave his offspring to the Tretyakov Gallery, he renamed it. The masterpiece is still there today. Visitors look at the canvas and are surprised to find something that even the most skillful reproductions are unable to convey: strokes, individual dots that make up the canvas. This is also a trace of one of the currents of art - divisionism.

This description of the painting "February Blue" can be considered complete.