Richibi’s Weblog

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      “Winter Mood”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Leonid Afremov 
 
     _____________
 

the thick application of paint in this painting, impasto,
and the disorder of acid colours in the foreground leaves, 
bring to mind Cézanne for me, 
and by inference, I guess, the more appealing, I think, Van Gogh
  
but the Belarusian Afremov, you might find interesting to know,
is from Vitebsk, the birthplace of Chagall,
studied at the school Chagall founded there,
as did incidentally in their times Malevich and Kandinsky also  
  
but the poetry of solitude by which this work touches me so
I find most reminiscent of Friedrich Caspar David‘s “The Wanderer“,
no less iconic a Romantic figure in art than Byron, Shelley, Keats became,
not to mention in Germany Goethe‘s tragic “Werther“, or in France, Victor Hugo 
  
in Spain the much earlier Don Quixote, inspired much later his compatriot Picasso,
whose own lonely horseman is to my mind recalled here, 
and in film more recent lonesome cowboys ride instead of on an open range
an empty street through a park in Paris maybe, Dresden, or Toronto
  
as on life’s journey they find, and we, each our road to follow 
  
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      thought I’d pass it along  
 
Richard