This work has a long history. A small forest pond is located right on the busy road – Kievskoe highway in the area of 60 kilometers towards Moscow. For many years, from April to October, we have been standing in a kilometer Sunday traffic jam in front of a traffic light in the village of Yakovlevskoye and each time we rebuild ourselves to the far right lane in advance in order to slowly and with pleasure look out of the car window at our small nameless pond 20 meters to the right. We never stopped to approach its shores – this is not allowed by the high-speed route.
The pond is surrounded by tall dense fir trees and in the middle of the day it is in deep shade, sharply contrasting with its impenetrable black surface with the blue sky and sunlit birches. This roadside forest landscape at different times of the year and in different weather each time reveals itself to us in a new guise and deserves a whole series of impressions in the style of Claude Monet. I decided to start with the option – noon on a cloudy July day.
Earlier I tried to capture an overgrown forest pond with oil pastels and decided that I needed to repeat this peculiar and difficult way of multi-layered mixing of colors on paper. Fortunately, this time there was black paper at hand and did not have to stubbornly cover most of the surface of the sheet with black.
Oil pastels with darker shades often become undesirable matte when mixed with lighter colors, but this time it played a plus. Due to this effect, the surface of the water at the lateral angle of view is as if covered with duckweed, and if you look at it from the right angle of view, the water becomes transparent black.
Oil pastels (Sennelier) on paper, 36×48, 2020
