The oeuvre of Ivan Aivazovsky, the world-famous marine painter, still has a great success with the audience and remains an unrivaled peak for his fellow workers. The artist had it all: long years of life, undeniable talent, and amazing efficiency.
However, even with all this, the value of Aivazovsky’s creative heritage is truly impressive — more than six thousand canvases came out from under his masterly brush, the vast majority of which are devoted to the sea element — the artist’s true love and passion.
Like any daydreamer, Aivazovsky was not seduced by the ordinary — he longed for the sublime and the exceptional. From this originates the way he worked on marinas that he developed. He never painted studies, believing that ‘… the movement of living elements is elusive for the brush: to write lightning, a gust of wind, a splash of waves is unthinkable from nature. To do this, the artist must remember them…’ In the open air, the artist worked only for a short time, then restoring the landscape in the workshop and giving full impetus to improvisation. The magnificent visual memory, thorough knowledge of the changing life of the sea and the sky provided an invaluable service to the master with such an artistic method, allowing, while sitting at the easel, to make a fictional pictorial odyssey around the world.
Perhaps, Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky reached the highest successes in his work in the 1850s and 1860s. In the collection of the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, there are several works by Aivazovsky. The author either effectively contrasts the lunar path full of mystery and the hot light of a bonfire on the shore (‘The Moonlit Night’), or balances on the brink of soft pink and shimmering blue in the glare of the setting sun (‘The Sea’); or is carried away by the transmission of a pearl haze of morning fog (‘The Barge on the seashore “). All these amazing canvases once again convince us that Kramsky”s well-known words about the marine painter are by no means an exaggeration: “Whatever and whoever say, Aivazovsky is a first-class star not only in Russia, but in the history of art in general”.
The artist worked at the intersection of romantic and realistic styles. The romantic influence of showing the sea was expressed in a particular addiction to the image of formidable storms, or the effects of solar or moonlight. The sea element in the landscapes from the museum”s collection is calm, but the paintings “Moonlit Night” and, in particular, “The Sea” allow us to appreciate the virtuoso art of the painter, whose brush was capable of transmitting the finest light-color nuances of the play of light reflected on the water.
