Friday, March 4, 2022

In the Wild North



Ivan Shishkin, In the Wild North, 1891, Kyiv National Museum of Russian Art, Ukraine More about Museums in Ukraine.

Posted by James Gurney at Friday, March 04, 2022

5 comments:

Garrett said...

I've always loved this image (haven't seen the painting in person!). Here in Canada I have seen so many snow covered trees that look just like this, but I just have so many questions about how he captured the scene so accurately.

I assume this was painted from various references..? Not sure how common night photography was at the turn-of-the-century, so is this a day-far-night approximation? From memory + daytime studies?

Would you say this could be painted with a limited warm/cool palette? Say ultramarine, black, and umber.. with the umber serving as the "warm" tone? Or would you need a dull yellow & red too?

March 4, 2022 at 11:39 AM
Garrett said...

I've always loved this image (haven't seen the painting in person!). Here in Canada I have seen so many snow covered trees that look just like this, but I just have so many questions about how he captured the scene so accurately.

I assume this was painted from various references..? Not sure how common night photography was at the turn-of-the-century, so is this a day-far-night approximation? From memory + daytime studies?

Would you say this could be painted with a limited warm/cool palette? Say ultramarine, black, and umber.. with the umber serving as the "warm" tone? Or would you need a dull yellow & red too?

March 4, 2022 at 11:40 AM
Garrett said...

I've always loved this image (haven't seen the painting in person!). Here in Canada I have seen so many snow covered trees that look just like this, but I just have so many questions about how he captured the scene so accurately.

I assume this was painted from various references..? Not sure how common night photography was at the turn-of-the-century, so is this a day-far-night approximation? From memory + daytime studies?

Would you say this could be painted with a limited warm/cool palette? Say ultramarine, black, and umber.. with the umber serving as the "warm" tone? Or would you need a dull yellow & red too?

March 4, 2022 at 11:53 AM
James Gurney said...

Garrett, I assume Shishkin looked at photography, but maybe daytime photography, because night photos in his day would have been relatively primitive and everything black and white. Though I don't know: there were people doing very long exposures at night. Here's a previous post about his view of the usefulness of photography: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2015/09/shishkin-and-photography.html

Anyway, the color would be based on memory mostly I presume. I can't say what pigments. There are many different scans of this image and the original must have wonderful qualities that we don't get in the scans.

March 4, 2022 at 2:23 PM
Garrett said...

Thanks for the response James! I too have noticed all the variations of this particular painting (some very green, while others more blue). Would love to see more Eastern paintings make their way to the West, else I will have to head that direction some day.

March 4, 2022 at 7:17 PM

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