Why did a Russian artist paint a picture in a… PIT? (PICS)

“…a festival of azure skies, pearl-studded birches, coral branches and sapphire shadows on lilac snow…” This was how artist Igor Grabar described the February days of 1904 in the Podolsk District.

During one of his walks around the Dugino Estate, he noticed a birch tree of rare beauty. While admiring the harmonious tree, he dropped his walking stick and had to bend down to pick it up again. “When I looked at the top of the birch from below, from the surface of the snow, I was stunned by the spectacle of fantastic beauty that opened before me!”

First, the artist sketched from life, then painted a study on canvas. After that, “he dug a trench in the deep snow, over a meter thick, where he settled in with his easel and a large canvas to capture the impression of a low horizon and the celestial zenith, with all the gradations of blue — from light green at the bottom to ultramarine at the top.” This is how the painting ‘February Azure’ came into being, which is now housed in the Tretyakov Gallery.

“I felt that I had managed to create the most significant work of all I had painted so far,” the artist once admitted. And this was his first Impressionist painting. While working on it, Grabar used the technique of pointillism — small strokes of pure, unmixed colors — to convey “the chimes and echoes of all the colors of the rainbow, united by the blue enamel of the sky”.