Open-Air
Painter
circa 1886
A painting within a
painting: in noticing the tiny splotch of red on the artist's canvas our eye inevitably
draws itself across the bumpy breadth of snow to the bigger spot of red, clearly
shaped in the form of a sleigh-like carriage equiped with reins, rickety wheels
and a rather audacious horse. Larsson uses this clever trick of staging his
painted 'props' so as to pull his
audience into the scene. Like agitated winter rabbits we are constantly
bouncing and zig-zagging across the tableau as our attentions are grabbed by
the strange shapes nestled here and there, or by sudden urges to discover or
re-visit specific details - or simply to escape into the distant copses. The
spindly branches of the largest tree, possibly an elm, spread themselves into a
flaked hovering web of snow-capped tentacles, all of which prod their wirey tips
into the biting air so as to taunt us, to threaten to snatch and drag us
inwards. But we are not that unwilling to venture in closer: the skis of the
boy's wooden sled, the faint central road heavily pounded with years of
pastoral traffic and the pairs of fleeting sledge marks - all converge to form
a stepping stone over which we may easily and weightlessly trip into this
wintery realm.
But will we choose to
remain in our cozier worlds and admire it from a distance? Or, like the heavy
wisps of smoke and charring timber and frozen air, will we let ourselves gently
recede into this nineteenth-century vista?
