Vacationing

This painting is extremely interesting in Ado Vabbe’s creative career. On the one hand, he uses several of the traits characteristic of his avant garde works – the generalisation of the figures, dynamic drawing, the endlessness and improvisational quality of colour surfaces, abstract images in the upper left hand corner, etc. On the other hand, the archaic farm buildings and the blue, black and white colouring form a very traditional background that even conveys conservative meanings. The combination of these two phenomena, the adaptation of his international avant garde experience to the motifs of his Estonian homeland, reveals two sides of Vabbe’s creative work. In his youth, Vabbe had been the number one avant garde artist in Estonia, who later started painting primarily realistic landscapes and figurative paintings.