Landscape

Elmar Kits worked in Saaremaa in 1957, where he had also painted the previous year, for which reason it can be assumed that the flat perspective extending into the distance in this painting similarly originates from Saaremaa. The painting’s composition is not dramatic. Objects or other kinds of landscape forms that are usually added to make works more dynamic have not been included to create tension, rather the landscape proceeds gently towards the horizon. It is possible that such a peaceful viewpoint also corresponded to Kits’s spiritual condition because it is believed that it was precisely at the end of the 1950s that Elmar Kits found a new and more personal approach to landscape art. Landscape is colourful, thus differing considerably from the dark and even somewhat muddy tones of the first period of the 1950s, which Kits used in painting compulsory Soviet themes. Here he now depicts an apolitical view of a landscape, being considerably more free, airy, and improvisational in both his brushing style and his use of colour. The awfully strict rules that had been established for painting had also started being eased somewhat by that time, for which reason we can really see the beginning of a new period in this landscape view.