David Blenko

This is not a photograph. It’s called Oak Grove, and it was painted in 1887 by Ivan Shishkin. Every furrow of bark, every leaf, every blade of grass in the shade of these old oaks was put there by hand. Shishkin painted trees so faithfully that his canvases are less like pictures of a forest and more like portraits of the trees themselves, each one rendered down to its smallest detail. He spent his life wandering the woods near his home outside Saint Petersburg, studying nature so closely that Russia gave him a nickname: the singer of the Russian woods. What I love most is that these oaks feel so alive, you can almost feel the coolness of their shade on your skin. And like very old trees in real life, they make you feel small in the best way possible, as if they have seen everything and are telling you that it will all be alright...

This is not a photograph. Every leaf and every reflection was put there by hand, in oil, by the Danish painter Peder Mørk Mønsted in 1894. It is called Wooded path by a river, and it captures the hardest thing there is to paint: a forest in full sunlight. Light through trees never falls evenly. It scatters into countless flecks of brightness and shadow, a glow on one leaf, darkness on the next, a glint on the water that would vanish the moment a cloud passed. Get those even slightly wrong, and the whole thing collapses into a green blur. Mønsted got every one of them right, and in doing so he captured something anyone who has stood alone in a wood will recognize immediately: that hush that falls over you, the sense of being completely at peace, and the feeling that the whole world has paused to breathe…

Picasso was 15 years old when he painted this. It looks nothing like a Picasso, and the reason why is one of the most beautiful things he ever said... It's called First Communion, made in 1896, and it was the first large canvas he ever completed. There are no strange angles here, no fractured faces, none of the wild reinvention his name now brings to mind. It is a stunning and technically flawless scene: a young girl kneeling at the altar in a white dress, about to take her first communion, the moment a child is meant to step toward adulthood. The translucence of the girl's veil, the altar boy's surplice, the light falling from a source outside the frame, all of it revealing a command of paint startling for his age. He built the whole picture around whiteness, linking the white of Lola's dress to the white of the altar cloth and the candlelight, so the eye reads the whole scene as a passage from one life into another. He was only 15, and he understood that... It was shown at a major exhibition in Barcelona, where the local press marveled that a boy not yet old enough to shave had painted like a master of the academy. At fifteen Picasso could already do this, the thing that thousands of trained artists spend their entire lives trying and failing to do. He had it as a boy. And he would spend the rest of his life trying to get back the one thing this perfect painting does not have: the freedom of a child, who paints without fear, without rules, and without yet knowing what is supposed to be impossible... He said it himself: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

This is one of the most famous paintings in America, and most people have no idea what they are actually looking at... The painting is Christina's World, made by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, and the woman was real: her name was Anna Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbour in Cushing, Maine. Since childhood a degenerative condition had slowly taken the strength from her legs, until walking was no longer possible. She refused a wheelchair, and for her entire adult life she chose to drag herself across the ground with her arms instead, going wherever she wanted to go under her own power. Wyeth saw her one afternoon from an upstairs window, alone in that vast field, crawling slowly toward the house on the hill. He said the painting was an attempt to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. Her world, he said, was limited physically but by no means spiritually. That is what turns this painting from a portrait of frailty into one of the most triumphant images ever made... Look at it long enough and it stops being about what her body took from her, and becomes about what she would not stop doing anyway. The field is enormous and she is small and the house is far away, and still she goes, because the alternative, to be carried, to give up, to let the distance win, was something she simply would not accept. There is one more thing: Christina loved this painting. Pink was her favorite color, and Wyeth had placed her exactly where she most wanted to be, out in the open, in her own field, under her own sky. Late in her life, when she could no longer even crawl out to that field, she said something that holds the whole meaning of art inside it: "Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture, and I’m there."