Constanta Art Museum

Nicolae Grigorescu, Flori de nalbă, ulei pe carton, 300 x 170

„Seascape”

Ștefan POPESCU (1872–1948)

The painting presents a rocky landscape by the sea, majestic in simplicity, made up of few figurative elements. The immensity of the sea meets the hardness and concreteness of the rock and creates an allegorical contrast between the fluid and transient character of the sea and the firmness and telluric inflexibility. Nature combines all these aspects, creating unity and harmony between fundamentally different elements. The artist manages to suggest this communion by the contrast expressed by the tones and shades of blue used to render the sky and the sea and the chromatic of ocher, yellow, green, pink, gray, used to render the rock. The foreground of the composition is dominated by the huge rock, which looms towards the sky, like a symbolic arrow of aspirations, and on the horizon, the sky joins the sea in a perfect symbiosis. Through thick touches, which follow different directions when rendering rocks (static element, which is dynamically shaped) and horizontal ones in terms of sea (dynamic element, which is statically shaped), the artist gives realism to the image. The white of the foamy waves brings cheerful accents to the image, giving brightness and contour to the shapes.