Petras Kalpokas (1880-1945) also created pastels in his youth, when he lived in Munich. This is a rare technique in his work, but here, too, one can recognise the traits of his style. The motif with the stream is composed in a similar way to other watercolours of the early period. The artist sets up the composition by highlighting the silhouettes of trees and bushes against the light. He paints a picture of strongly generalised shapes, without going into detail. He ingeniously uses the method of colour composition discovered by the Impressionists. In order to achieve the impression of a lively fluttering of vegetation and spaciousness, he draws contrastingly on warm yellow-greenish tones with cold blues, and, on the contrary, he irritates blues and greens with yellows. In this way, he replaces the material image with a mirage-like and spiritual one, reflecting the artistic aspirations of the time. The painting is valuable not only from an artistic point of view, but also in the sense that Kalpokas's later work shows a further development of this method of painting.
Dr. Nijolė Tumėnienė
