Landscape work by Arkhip Kuindzhi “North” was written at the end of the nineteenth century in 1879. The painting is in Moscow in the State Tretyakov Gallery. The picture “North” is characterized by features of impressionism. In the understanding of the author of a pictorial work, the image of the north is a world filled with silence, the breath of coldness, the boundless, indefinite space where the reality, the customary laws of the earthly, natural and heavenly worlds are otherwise rethought.
The atmosphere of infinity of space is born as a result of the combination of earth and sky in the horizon line, which, it seems, will very soon disappear, dissolving all conceivable boundaries and conventions. The north is a world of beautiful untouched wilderness, a world of cold, a kingdom of earth and sky in its primordial nature.
A landscape image of the northern natural world is made using the color method of stretching. The color stretching is created here in such a way that the growth and enhancement of the color is carried out from the darkest, almost black green tone to the light, pinkish, to which the entire sky space is written out.
The landscape is dominated by bright, airy images. On a bright, bright sky, you can hardly distinguish the outlines of clouds, the horizon line is poorly identified and just as light. The picture is distinguished by its atmospheric, lightness, smoothness of lines – all this gives rise to an image that pierces the sky above, rushing somewhere into infinity for an unattainable, almost imperceptible horizon line.
The motive of the canvas is the motive of loneliness, longing. The North itself speaks here. With genuine strength, the power of this harsh world is felt where the wind is born and the unbearable cold lives where man thinks of himself only as an insignificant grain of sand in comparison with the eternal beauty of the northern land, in comparison with this Universe of cold, scorching wind and loneliness.
Hardly perceptible color transitions, the colouristic “running-in” of the outflows was written out artistically. Dark green, almost black in its grandeur and depth, the northern trees serve as a central image that saturates the entire image with the power and inexhaustible energy of the northern air, the discreet paints and endless spaces.
The name of the painting “North” is a pointed, sharpened steel blade in its power of sound and impact. The name “North” echoes, pierces the cold north wind and freezes in the air with beautiful snow patterns. The north is the beginning of the beginning, and a definite limit, but not the limit of the forces and opportunities to live and overcome yourself again and again in the conquest of such an unassailable world. The north is a constant confrontation of the elements. The North is a chilling soul of the wind, piercing directly into the heart and making it stop. This is an inescapable and inescapable sense of the abyss, an age-old orientation of the gaze to the sky, which spreads in milky-gray fogs, disappearing into the distance, dissolving into eternity.
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