I recently went to The Museum of Russian Art, which if you’ve read my blog for a while you may remember some prior posts about this beautiful place (which has had a Ukrainian flag prominently painted on the front of the building for the last couple months). The first painting I saw on this visit landed my attention and my affection as well. I’ve been thinking about it for several weeks. It’s called “Among the Birch Trees” by Akhmed Kitaev in 1962. I hope you’ll click this link to see the painting before you read further.
The painting seemed at first to be a picture of a forest of birch trees. Beautiful cream, gray, and brown bark, bright green leaves, long lean trunks. But then I saw the woman. If you clicked the link above, do you see her now too? Peering out from behind one of the trees is a woman. Was she posing? Or did the artist capture her as she was walking through the forest and just emerging from behind a tree? It almost seems as if she was hiding behind the tree and just now emerged to say, “Here I am!” There’s something playful about her. See the tilt of her head. Look closely and find the bouquet in one hand and the single flower in her other hand. She wears a clear plastic rain coat and a clear plastic rain hat held under her neck with a pink plastic tie, and a black purse hangs over her wrist. Her rain gear all has a pinkish hue. She wears a watch and a dress, not pants. Her hair is dark and worn typical of the 1960s.
She looks like an ordinary middle-aged woman of her time and place who went out to do some shopping on a rainy day, but instead of walking down gray sidewalks on a gray street to a neighborhood store, she instead stepped into the forest and there takes a stroll gathering flowers and being flirtatious with the beauty of the birch. I like to think that she is playing hooky from her errand to the store. That she ditched the errand and strolled boldly into the forest. Maybe she enacted a stealth walk, veering only at the last minute away from the store and toward the forest lest anyone notice. Maybe she hid around corners of buildings, kept her head down, bent over more than necessary to tie her shoe or fix a stocking to escape the questioning gaze of a neighbor or coworker. When the coast was clear, she made a dash into the forest and hugged the birch. She breathed deeply. Lifted her face to the sky. Leaned back against a tree and rested.
Or maybe she was simply taking the long way to wherever she was going. Adding joy and rejuvenation to her day wherever and whenever she could. I much like that idea as well. I love this painting and hope you’ll look at it awhile. Maybe you’ll come up with your own story about the woman in the painting.
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[Photo: A slice of the painting described in the post. Click through to enjoy it in full!]