Rapeseed
We were in the bus going from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsck. The passengers were sleeping on each other’s shoulders after a sleepless night in the train while outside the windows the Kaliningrad Region landscape was sweeping past. The attention of the schoolchildren, which the most of the passengers were, was seldom attracted to the windmills and the stork’s nestles on the roofs of the houses. The rocking of the bus plunged me even more into the doze. But suddenly the bus filled with shouts of enthusiasm. I looked into the window and first time in my life saw the land covered by the dense carpet of the bright-yellow flowers. It were rapeseed flowers. Essentially, all the landscape was composed of the contrast of blue sky and brightly-yellow land and only somewhere the coloring was diluted by sparse trees.
I decided that I definitely should go there and try to paint that. I was already seeing the place which I would paint: the yellow carpet of the flowers, the blue sky and the house with orange walls and a silver roof, surrounded by trees.
After several days I came back to the field and peak a way right in the thick of rapeseed. It hard and heavy stems rose up highly above the ground. While I was painting the study, the cows were passing by me like vacuum cleaners, ducked their heads into the yellow sea of flowers. By tradition I didn’t finish the work that day and spent the next day in the field also.
After some time the study ceased to satisfy me at all: I set the task to myself to give the viewer the feeling of that endless field, the combination of yellow and blue. I wished to seat the viewer into the rapeseed tangle. But the flowers appeared to be mean and didn’t convey my impression from the field at all. It wasn’t the rapeseed flowers. The sky got pale, had a some pink color tint and wasn’t contrasting with the flowers. But the subject didn’t leave me alone and I decided to make the work on the errors: to paint the full picture after the study. All the more the big size would give more opportunities to make the planned reality.
About painting process:
In the end the work was done in one year. One might be surprised with such a length time. But the year is a time from the beginning of the work and till its end, not everyday painting. Usually the drying of the layers of the paint takes a lot of time. But some difficulties very frequently appear in the process, not all turns out as it should be. Sometime the other work prevents you from completing the original project. The work “matures”. So I don’t know if a year is a long time or not.
