Two layers: the wash, then the line
The making of this picture is really the meeting of two habits Gorky had spent twenty years building separately, finally allowed to happen on the same surface. The first is automatism. The word comes straight out of Surrealism, and it means letting the hand move freely, fed by the unconscious, without a plan: you start drawing or painting and you follow where the marks go rather than deciding in advance what to depict. The Surrealists used automatism to fish images up out of the parts of the mind that conscious control keeps quiet. Gorky took the technique and made it his own engine. The teeming shapes in this canvas were not designed and then executed; they were found, in the act, by a free hand.
The second habit is the opposite of free: it is drawing, the most disciplined thing Gorky did. He was a superb draftsman, and in his late work he carried that line directly into the painting rather than burying it. The mechanics on this canvas are unusually clear. He worked the color thin and wet, letting it wash, stain, soak and bleed into the canvas so that edges run and the weave shows through, much closer to watercolor than to thick oil paint. Then, over that flowing colored ground, he laid a nervous, dark, drawn line that defines the shapes. The painting is built in two passes: the unconscious wash underneath, the drawing on top. Neither cancels the other.
What those shapes are made of is two things fused. The Buffalo AKG describes the work as joining the artist’s physical surroundings, the Virginia farm and its plants, with his memories of the gardens of his homeland, the remembered Armenia of his childhood. So the forms are organic, fertile, growing things, half-recalled and half-seen, neither a portrait of Virginia nor an illustration of Armenia but a single image-world distilled out of both. The thinning, the staining, the freely found shapes and the drawn line all serve that one aim: to get growth and memory onto the canvas as feeling rather than as a depicted place.
This is also one of the largest canvases Gorky ever painted, roughly six by eight feet, mural-scale. That decision is not incidental to the making. The intimate, doodled, watercolor-like marks he was discovering are blown up here to the size of a wall, and holding that scale steady across a surface built from free, accidental, bleeding shapes is most of the difficulty and most of the achievement.