Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Analect2.679x



17 March 2010. Hazy sun, and an almost warm spring day. Birds enjoying things, too...

The older Volga, fishing weirs, poles for nets, sometime in the late 1800s... Where every surface seems touched--worn and woven at the river's edge. Figures gathered around a skiff--their stiff poses of an early spring. Heavy Russian coats, belted, an arm wrapped round a riverman's staff--tall and thin diagonal set against a sky of incoming clouds.

It's the scale of each part--this one feels--the size and shape of a piece of wood, or the stones piled carefully into a low wall...

As in the paintings, or Tarkovsky's film--Andrei Rublev, the painter/monk as he "confronts Russian pagans cavorting naked through misty forests." He resists. But later, it's Marfa, the pagan woman, who unties the cords with which they've bound him--and saves the painter from crucifixion...

No comments: