Moldova has an ancient history of civilization with artifacts dating as far back as artifacts can date. Shards of pottery indicate that an ancient people continually lived in the region for some 3000 years in the stone ages. Since then the land has been conquered by about a dozen region powers successively until it finally broke free of the soviet union in the 1990's. Despite all the turmoil over the centuries the vast majority of the Moldovan people still identify with their indigenous ancestors. With respect to the landscape, Moldova is mostly land locked although according to google maps I saw a small shard of it contacting an inlet of the Chorne sea, part of the Black sea. For the most part, Moldova resembles Canada to my eye, there are plenty of trees, rivers, and lakes interspersed with grasslands and rolling mountains. How Moldova got its name remains a mystery, on wikipedia there was a story about a historical figure loosing his hunting dog named Molda in a river, which lead to him naming the river Molda, which sounds an awful lot like Moldova. I think the story would be better if the dog were named Maldo, and the historical fellow shouted out "Where's Maldo?" which lead to the idea for the book series of a similar sounding name. But I just made up that part.
One thing that did strike me were there prominent trees. Maybe its because they cleared most of the land for farming, but I saw several pictures of mighty trees towering over an otherwise desolate landscape. Japanese prints often feature mighty trees with red leaves, so I went with that concept for the painting, along with the meandering Molda river. After doing a lot of blue and green paintings I intentionally avoided those two colours, instead relying on orange, magenta, dark brown, and black to carry the scene. The main compositional elements are the dark tree against the shimmering river, and the red leaves against the pale orange sky.
World Inspired Landscapes: Moldova, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, April 2024
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