Artist’s Flowers

The 1930s were the most significant creative period in Adamson-Eric’s career. The works he painted in the 1930s are among the classics of Estonian art. They represent many different genres: landscapes, portraits, nudes, and hybrids of the aforementioned. For Adamson-Eric, still life was a more intimate platform for exercises in colour and brushwork rather than a representative format. His vivid palette has found its way to the canvas through dense brushwork that was typical of the period and filled every square centimetre of the picture. According to artist Olev Subbi, an admirer of Adamson-Eric’s talent, this labour-intensiveness was one of the peculiarities of classical Estonian painting, where a lot of attention was paid to craftsmanship. In the left-hand corner you can see a piece of rope – a motif that appears in a number of his paintings from the same period, where it occasionally acquires a symbolic meaning. In this case one may assume the motif is primarily present for compositional purposes: the texture and shape of the piece of rope, different from the flowers, bring a new rhythm to the surface of the painting.