This is probably one of Konrad Mägi’s most famous paintings. Created on the island of Vilsandi near the lighthouse facing north. Mägi came to Vilsandi to improve his health and relax, but he becomes inspired and paints here for two summers in a row. The area around the Vilsandi lighthouse is his most important painting location, here he spends days and probably weeks, painting dozens of works. Mägi doesn’t show much interest in the open sea, which stretches out from here – the vast expanse of blue does not captivate him; the sea is reduced to a narrow blue strip at the top of the painting. Mägi is much more fascinated by the flora in this area, which is indeed extraordinarily diverse and memorable.

Even if we recognise among the plants the green wall-rue, the shining cranesbill with lilac flowers, or the Danish scurvy-grass with white flowers, which can be found mostly only around the Vilsandi lighthouse in all of Estonia, this painting is not about them. Much more important are the brushstrokes and strokes, and the spots of colour carrying the trajectory of the brush. The fusion of forms and colors and the pattern created by dense brushstrokes are more important than what the artist has painted. Therefore, the Saaremaa period is referred to as the first time when an artist painted the country’s nature in the key of modernism: colour and brushstroke were now almost independent of what they depicted, and the painting became very similar to some abstract work, where the question of what is painted is not as important as the question of how it is painted.

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