Leonard Turzhanskii
Spring Coming
circa 1922 (?)
Perhaps in this scene there is an equal play between sight and sound. The emphasis on the coming of Spring is not placed on typical (though still beautiful) images of blooming green shoots and flowers or of new offspring of nature but, on the contrary, on what is going to be temporarily lost and hidden with its arrival. Pairing snow with sunlight, the two main figures in this scene, the artist creates a direct flow of communication between what he wanted his viewers to see and what he then wanted them to sense and feel. With simple visuals Turzhanskii makes the coming of Spring personal to each of us: he draws sound out of sight, impressing individual ideas of melting, mushy snow in our minds as if it were really taking place, drop by drip, in the painted courtyard before us. Even the roosters may now come to life, clucking and pecking around their snowy territory in search of hibernating seeds, and it is at this point that we may actually feel rather than just see the coming of Spring on this two-dimensional canvas. Underneath the paint is the subtle message of the progression of time; it spreads itself over landscapes in the form of seasons, redefining what we see differently each time and painting for us new ways in which to interpret what we think we may see, versus what is really there.
