August Hia column by Marina Fedorova: Light, Sea and the Art of Remembering

There is a difference between the light of June and the light of August.

By the time August arrives, summer is no longer a promise but an experience. We have already collected sunrises, train journeys, swims in cold water, long lunches by the sea, and evenings that seemed as though they would never end. Perhaps this is why August has inspired artists for centuries. It is a month of abundance, but also of reflection.

Few painters captured this feeling better than Anders Zorn. Born in Sweden, Zorn became famous for his portraits and remarkable ability to paint water. Looking at his summer scenes today, one can almost feel the warmth of the rocks, hear the gentle movement of the lake, and smell pine trees heated by the northern sun. Unlike the dazzling Mediterranean light of Southern Europe, Zorn’s summer is quieter and more intimate. His paintings are filled with women bathing in lakes, reflections shimmering on the water’s surface, and evenings that seem suspended between day and night. There is an awareness that the northern summer is brief and precious. Every ray of sunlight matters.

If Zorn gives us the poetry of northern August, Salvador Dalí offers its southern counterpart. The landscapes surrounding Dalí’s home in Port Lligat on the Costa Brava are among the most distinctive in twentieth-century art. White houses cling to the coastline. The sea glitters under the relentless Mediterranean sun. Sharp rocks emerge from the water like sculptures carved by time itself. For Dalí, this landscape was not merely a backdrop. It became inseparable from his imagination and from one of the most extraordinary love stories in art history.

When Gala entered his life, she transformed not only the man but also the mythology surrounding his work. Together they created a world in which love, memory, dreams, and landscape became impossible to separate.

The heat of August lives there: intense, passionate, almost unreal. And yet, for many artists, the most valuable souvenir of summer is not a finished masterpiece. It is a sketchbook. Long before smartphones, artists travelled with notebooks. They collected fragments of the world: a harbour seen at dusk, a handwritten observation, the colour of a cloud before a storm, the outline of a distant mountain.

Last summer, while travelling through Brittany, I found myself returning again and again to a sketchbook. Not to record places accurately, but to preserve something more elusive, the changing colour of the Atlantic Ocean, the silhouette of fishing boats, the feeling of wind carrying the scent of salt across the cliffs. Years later, a painting may emerge from such notes. But often the sketchbook itself remains the most honest portrait of a journey.

This is perhaps why Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book feels so appropriate for August reading.

Set on a small island, the novel follows a young girl and her elderly grandmother through a series of seemingly simple summer moments. There is no dramatic plot. Instead, there are conversations, observations, silences, and reflections on nature and life itself. The child looks forward. The grandmother looks back. Together they remind us that every summer contains both perspectives at once.

Artists have always understood that beauty lives in moments of transition. Anders Zorn found it in the fleeting light of northern lakes. Salvador Dalí discovered it among the sunlit rocks of the Mediterranean. Countless travellers preserve it in sketchbooks filled with quick drawings, notes, and fragments of experience.

August invites us to do the same. Not necessarily to look back, but to pause. To gather impressions before life accelerates again. To notice the colour of the sea, the shape of a cloud, the conversation that lingers long after the evening ends.

MARINA FEDOROVA