The book tells about the life and creative work of a painter Jānis Osis. He belongs to the generation of Latvian artists who worked in the 1950s –1980s. The vast heritage he has left reveals him to be a master of realistically romantic landscapes and figurative painting.
Jānis Osis had a special talent for depicting a distinctive environment infused with light and shadow, in which the illusion of volume is built by the relationship of light and dark planes. The motifs are unpretentious, but it is in this artlessness that the charm of his realistic painting lies. Even depicting the most unsophisticated scenery, Jānis Osis transformed it into an artistic image by a precisely applied ratio of colour with lights and shades. The artist took pleasure in painting individual objects and achieved a striking materiality in depicting details of clothing and of various objects. He had a gift of nature which is sometimes called absolute sight – a capacity to discern in nature and to transfer onto canvas accurate proportions of light and dark, an ability to use painting techniques to achieve a feeling of space and corporeality, and to estimate the impact of light on objects.
The legacy left by Jānis Osis amounts to about two thousand paintings.