Yakut artist Lev Gabyshev often painted landscapes from nature and worked a lot in the vicinity of the Lena River. He devoted a lot of paintings to local views, for example, ‘The Lena Vistas’ or ‘Old Village on the Lena Banks’. One of these paintings – ‘Сliffy Banks of the Lena’ – was painted in 1958 and is kept in the collection of the National Fine Arts Museum of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).
The cliffy banks of the Lena is a deep canyon in Siberia that was formed thousands of years ago. In some areas, the height of the cliffy shore reaches 200 meters. ‘These are huge, majestic cliffs, the likes of which I have rarely seen even on the seashores. They are terribly trenched, wild, scary, so I want to pass them by as soon as possible’, described them Ivan Goncharov.
In this painting, Gabyshev depicted a panorama of the Lena River and its majestic and rocky shore. A light wind ripples the surface of the water, which reflects the light blue sky and curly clouds. The chain of mountains, the movement of water and clouds form a web of vertical lines.
Gabyshev was a romantic and perceived nature as a single, sacred organism created by God. For the artist, mountains symbolized mystery and greatness, so he sought to convey their grandiose scale. The banks of the Lena form in the picture a monumental chain of sheer cliffs, which can create feelings of wonder and awe.
For the landscape, the painter chose a restrained color palette: brown, green, blue and white. He used clean, bright colors, which enhanced the effect of soft natural light and air in the space of the picture. To realistically convey the details, the artist applied different tone systems: numerous shades, light and dark tones and strokes of different width.
Gabyshev often turned to the genre of intimate lyrical landscape. Pictures of this type are distinguished by a small size, modest motifs and a restrained color palette. Often such paintings are called ‘mood landscapes’ because they convey a specific emotion and can express the author’s mood: sadness, joy, longing, nostalgia.
The simple and lyrical composition of the painting “Сliffy Banks of the Lena” is filled with a sense of admiration for nature. Gabyshev combined in the canvas a realistic image of landscape details and his poetic view of his native land.
