It seems that Your web browser is out-of-date. Please us a modern web browser.
Olev Subbi was 40 years old when he completed this painting, but it can still be regarded as belonging to his early creative period. Deportation in Siberia had taken eight years of his life, but he did not seem to let that bother him too much. By the 1970s he had made a name for himself as an artist and his first paintings had attracted widespread attention.
In Subbi’s case it is not easy to draw a clear line between his early and later creative periods. Subbi himself has claimed that his interests remained pretty much the same over the years, and in some ways, he was always painting one and the same painting. His main research object was colour, and in order to study it he experimented with various narratives, brushwork and composition principles.
Still-lifes became part of Subbi’s oeuvre in the later periods. This small-sized painting comes across as an intimate trial piece in which he has taken a poetic approach to a fragment of everyday life. The brushwork in this painting is characteristic of the period: dense and layered, capable of rendering clearly outlined objects as well as more diffuse stretches of colour. Subbi’s colours are diverse: he uses both warm and cold shades. Composition-wise he divides the painting into two: the lower part is white and constitutes a screen against which the subdued colours of the upper part brighten up and simultaneously acquire a certain depth.