The East Geography Art Observations Nature

Senchikhin's 1969 painting of the Aral and the disappearance of the Aral Sea

The Aral Sea, a boat, 1969. This picture hangs in my home in one of the most prominent places, beside several similarly unassuming subjects, all of them from the Aral. It is a fairly simple specimen of the genre study in the Impressionist manner, by an author who is not the most famous, though a very good Asian painter of the Sixties generation: Senchikhin.

What did I find in this work? I very much like showing it to friends and repeating that it reminds me how something great, immovable and eternal can vanish in the blink of an eye. How the Aral Sea suddenly just went and disappeared: not the most ancient sea on Earth, having existed for under 18,000 years, but a navigable one, which fed an entire region and had its own flotilla of fishing, merchant and even naval vessels. And which, before the eyes of a single generation, turned into a tiny puddle in the middle of a vast salt desert.

In short, the marine canvases of the Aral are for me personally a tragic and bitter memento mori.

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Frederic Leighton

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Senchikhin's 1969 painting of the Aral and the disappearance of the Aral Sea

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September digest: archaeological finds, exhibitions, museums, theatre and the Church

Frederic Leighton

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