Art of Ivan Aivazovsky presented by Rassouli

This week we will be standing on the shoulder of a Ukrainian giant Ivan Ivozovsky, who lived between the years 1817 and 1900. He was one of the greatest landscape painters of all time, especially in seascapes. Ivozovsky's success is well earned because no other artist has managed to capture with such brilliance and ease one of the most difficult subjects for the painters, which is the changing moods of the sea. Ivozovsky's art is romantic in nature. He develops strong contrasts and undoubtedly he is a master of putting light and darkness against each other. His romantic style also shows in his choice of subjects. We find many shipwrecks, raging sea battles and storms in his works. Ivozovsky was a prolific artist who created over 6,000 canvases aside from his sketches. He broke from conventional landscapes and combined severe realism with a sense of poetry. He yearned to achieve truth in his art, so he painted or sketched directly from life. His paintings seem accurate and exact. They all have a pulse of life within them. Instead of copying the nature directly, Ivozovsky's canvases have depicted the sea filled with movement. You can see in his later works that he is so familiar with details in a way that even the works that he has completed in the studio feel like he was sitting in the nature and painting them. There are elements in the nature that cannot be directly captured by the brush. It's impossible to paint lightning, gushing waves of the ocean or a gust of wind directly from nature. The artist has to remember them to paint. Ivozovsky's phenomenal power of remembrance and recall has enabled him to use his romantic imagination to develop these elements of nature so powerfully. The movement of the waves in his canvases are more intense than what we see in the ocean or in the sea. His brushstrokes seem almost transparent. It seems as the sea goes through endless transformations. Ivozovsky was so much in love with the process of painting that even in his last day of life, he painted a canvas which he did not get to finish.