This landscape painting showcases a vibrant, impressionistic style. The canvas is filled with a myriad of colors, from the lush greens of the trees and foliage to the dynamic blues and whites of the cloudy sky. The brushstrokes are bold and expressive, creating a sense of movement and energy throughout the composition. The scene depicts a pastoral setting, with figures walking in the foreground and a distant town or village visible on the horizon. The artist's use of light and color evokes a sense of tranquility and warmth, inviting the viewer to immerse themselves in the natural beauty of the landscape. This work likely reflects the artist's intention to capture the essence of the rural environment through their unique, post-Impressionist perspective. ...
Stephen Polatch dissolves the complex hierarchy of natural, architectural, and human orders. Typically, a central exchange between Polatch’s subjects is what matters most in his works. Moments such as these — crossing glances, collaborations between humans and animals, or inner visions projecting into the picture plane— occupy a focal point from which his compositions are bent around. Their compact scale also lends the works a concentrated sense of longing for something purer and more direct, which corresponds to his technique of applying unmixed pigment directly to the surface of the canvas. Polatch refutes a stable chronology, employing a wide range of historical references, from the lyricism and symbolic imagery of medieval illuminated manuscripts, the brilliant lighting of the Nabis, to the repetitive mechanics of Futurism—within the interconnected systems of Polatch’s compositions is the promise, the rushing fluidity, of discovering the new in the familiar. ...
