Alfons Walde

The featured painting shows a landscape in Austrian Tyrol, like many of Alfons Walde's paintings, a specific season, in this case spring. The artist often painted the same landscape or town in different seasons and various lighting situations. His favored subject was his home Tyrol, in Vienna he where he met Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, he felt less comfortable. A path leads the viewer into the painting, passing several buildings as well as a small church, until it disappears behind a green hill. In the background snowy mountains tower in front of a blue sky. The composition follows a zig-zag line that is created by bright and dark hills, contrasting light and shadow, and is continued by the sharp edges of the mountains in the background. The spring time sun has forced the snow back into the very tips of the mountains, where it contrasts with the dark blue-grey of the shadowy peaks. The hills show the nature that is awakening from it's winter dormancy with many different shades of green. The landscape is interspersed with white buldings, that line the path. A few red spots contrast the blue of the background. The alternation between white and blue-grey in the background stands in opposition to the bright and dark green in the front. Long shadows accentuate the effect even further. Especially the jagged shadows and sharp edges in the mountains lend the painting a very geometric feeling. Nevertheless the landscape feels natural, also due to the trees on both sides. With wide brushstrokes and much paint, Walde sculpts the rough walls of the buildings, in contrast to the hills and mountains, where he chooses to use a much smoother paint application. Those different styles of paintings bring life to the artworks, unmatched by other artists. Devoid of humans, the landscape seems calm and quiet, as still seen today in many rural areas of Tyrol that are sparsely populated. Walde manages to mesmerize the viewers with his unique atmospheric paintings like no other.