Aroma for the painting: the Baltic summer garden in the morning
Taste for the painting: rhubarb, gooseberry, red currant
Technique: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 39 х 53,5 cm
Style: Positive Synergism
Private collection
Some names sound like a grounding for any base, like a starting point for all starts… Here belongs the name of the outstanding Estonian artist and his remarkable personality… The name of Ants Laikmaa… He was the one who in 1907 founded the very first Estonian Art Association. Thanks to his fresh sight of a painter, who had measured his whole way from Paide to Düsseldorf on foot (same as the first Estonian poet Kristjan Jaak Peterson from Riga to Derpt), and who had travelled a lot in different countries, it became possible to build a cultural life in his native land, too…
In Saint Petersburg, when he was working in the museum of the Art academy, he was happy to get familiar with the ‘World of Art’ - the artistic movement, that included Sergei Diaghilev, Alexandre Benois, Konstantin Somov, Dmitry Filosofov, Léon Bakst, Eugene Lansere, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Mikhail Vrubel, Mikhail Nesterov, Isaac Levitan…
In the Düsseldorf Arts Academy, where studied such notable artists as Ivan Shishkin, Ekaterina Junge, Ivan Aivazovsky, and Michael Clodt, he got acquainted with works by the Zonderbund-group artists. There he also saw paintings by such famous French artists as Claude Monet and Édouard Manet. There he also admired landscapes by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, genre paintings by Edgar Degas, still lifes by Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh...
His career he started as a master of portraiture (he mostly painted portraits of Estonian intellectuals and of the West Estonia farmers), but he was similar good at natural landscapes, still lifes, and… You know, a founder is an originator, creator, initiator, and a pioneer of all and everything… His favourite technique was pastel…
His paintings could definitely be successfully compared with masterpieces of all the above-mentioned celebrities and recognized masters, as well as the dissonant harmony music by Arvo Pärt could be compared with the classical music chef d'oeuvres… But this is not copying and imitation, plagiarism or citation… It is an allusion to… and a creative reconceptualization… It is a feeling of deep admiration, a feeling of reverential respect, awe, wonder, and amazement at the grandeur of pioneers and precursors… As the classical harmony is imprinted in the dissonance music, so the long-established, accepted, traditional, and conventional art is reflected in the experimental and innovative one…
Ants Laikmaa was born in a small house on the Paiba farm of the Araste village belonging to the Vigala Parish in the Lääne County of Estonia. His last home in the Kadarpiku village of the same Lääne County the artist constructed according to his own drawings. It is surrounded by a gorgeous natural park. The house is very cozy, but also veeeeeery small… This is the way how it happens in Estonia: in tiny houses and tiny flats there are beating big hearts of big creators…
