Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi is a master of such a genre as a landscape. The artist throughout his creative period created a variety of landscape works, depicting sea, mountain, rural, urban and many other subjects. And indeed the plot of his paintings was quite diverse.
An example of a beautiful landscape with the image of mountains can be considered Kuindzhi mountain landscape “Ai-Petri, Crimea.” This work was created in the period 1898-1908, the exact date of creation is not established. To date, the canvas is exhibited in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
Ai-Petri is one of the mountains in the Crimean mountain range, which is located in Yalta. The silhouette of Mount Ai-Petri, which in Greek means “Saint Peter” is formed from Cape Ai-Todor with the Swallow’s nest to the figured teeth.
Ai-Petri is a very beautiful mountain with an expressive silhouette pattern. Landscape Kuindzhi with the image of Mount Ai-Petri is as simple as possible, is compositionally clear, unimaginative with bizarre forms and playing with different textures. Throughout the horizon stretched figured teeth Ai-Petri, filling the space of the picture plane from edge to edge. Thus, the space is saturated with a mountain stone massif. Exactly from the real living rock from the picture comes the cold, a sense of heaviness and obstruction.
Created by the landscape painter, the effect of color stretching, from the whitened glowing sky to the blackness of the black mountain foot. Bright blue colors and, in general, all the selection of shades give the canvas a beautiful sound, ringing and chilling, like the wind at the top of the mountain “St. Peter”.
Kuindzhi created an image of inaccessible mountains, majestic, proud, unshakable, steadfast, just like a man who has a holy will, like a warrior, coldly killing enemies of his native land.
To everything, the landscape is beautiful in itself. Blue, ultramarine shades look very active, bright and boring. Ai-Petri in some places is covered with blue fog, which gives the landscape a mystery and artistic complexity, finally not reducing the initially simplified composition. Smooth strokes resemble the glossy surface of the photographic frame.
The landscape feels like reality, like the breath of real life. The landscape is inaccessible, just as the steep mountain peaks are inaccessible. Height, cold and dangerous, scary and beckoning, attracts the beauty of its outlines, frightens the silence and chilling gusts of the wind. It’s so easy to drown in the thick of this magnificent blue abyss, to break into the abyss from the top of the Holy Beautiful Ai-Petri.
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