At age ten, Ilya Repin watched his cousin paint a watermelon. The budding artist regarded the process of creating an illusion out of raw pigments as utterly magical, and he “never lost fascination and wonderment for the process of painting, investing it with an autonomous, mystical, almost religious quality.”
This, according to David Jackson’s new biography of the 19th Century realist, entitled Ilya Repin: The Russian Vision.
Below: Repin's early work "Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom." (Click on it to enlarge.)
Tomorrow: Storage Tip for Watercolor Tubes
3 comments:
I'm new to your blog, but I'm glad I found it---so much to see and read and think about, thanks for all the work-------Susan
Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment, Susan. I admire you for painting daily, and I love what you're doing with color.
Ilya Repin is one of my favorites. Something about the murkiness of the colors and the facial features of the figures in the painting you featured seem very Rembrandt-esque to me compared to some of his more naturalistic later work. I wonder if this work was created completely from the imagination.
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