Lake

The oil painting presents a landscape with a lake. The scenery is laid out using the coulisse effect and consists of natural items of a simplified, geometrical shape. The first plan is occupied by an arched strip of land, painted with a smooth patch of green-brown colour. Above it, there is a spherical and “openwork” shrub – painted with subtle brushing – adjacent to the right edge of the canvas. Further up, there is, wider than the bottom strip of land, a fragment of albescent water, in which – on the left – a blue-grey path reflects. This reflection comes from the hilly hummock, resembling the shape of a quarter of an oval, adjoining the lake. Meanwhile, the oval osculates the figure with a shape resembling a right-angled triangle whose hypotenuse is slightly dished. In the rearmost plane there is a dirty white-and-blue sky. The landscape is painted in an austere and cool colour gamut: khaki greens, subdued blues, greys and whites. All items of nature – the hills covered with woods, the beach – are expertly cleaned of unnecessary details and reduced to regular, flat shapes – painted quite uniformly with subtle and soft strokes. These items of nature are only a starting point for a formal, but also metaphorical game. [M. Krzyżanowska]