We've been looking at Vasily Polenov's Life of Christ Cycle for some days. Maybe we could step away for a day to consider this 1886 nature painting I discovered just the other day. We call these kinds of paintings landscapes. But Vasily Polenov loves scenes that are as much views of water — a river, stream, pond, lake. We might call them waterscapes. Polenov seems to understand water's calming power.
Here, it appears we are with the artist out on the water, perhaps sitting in a small boat. The water is so filled with plant life it is more green and less reflective of the sky. But there's a great movement of life going on here, much of it invisible. The large, flat leaves of Waterlilies take in oxygen, and through long stems deliver it to the rhizomes (fleshy roots) buried in the mud at the bottom of the pond. I love the vertical streaks that seem to radiate or explode out of the ground between the two trees on the left. There's a path in the middle of the painting connecting the pond with the top of the berm. What a wonderfully alive, summer-cloudy sky.
Speaking of invisible, we see again that Vasily Polenov is a master not only of water and all the green things, but of painting the sky in its many changing moods. Vasily captures skyscapes. My science-teacher friend writes:
"For me, I like to think of the sky as all of it without end. I don't want the sky to be limited to what my human eyes can perceive. Yes, what we can see can sometimes be quite beautiful...the blue refraction as a canvas, the different hues during a sunrise, the puffy white clouds...but the real beauty is what we can't see, for we can't live without the invisible parts of it. Every molecule contributing to our existence. And at night we can see so much more, which is ironic, because in every other situation that I can think of, darkness limits our vision, but in the absence of light, the universe opens up to us and reveals that we are not alone. With every star, I see other worlds and wonder what and who are out there. And I think that maybe, just maybe, there is a 'someone' out there who is wondering the same thing."
