On the right-hand side of the painting there are three red blobs the Cossacks' hats, but that's all we get of the Cossacks. By them there are two long lance-type things I didn't know Cossacks used lances that stretch the height of the canvas. There are lots of other lines all over the place some perhaps denote buildings, others birds, in the way that children sometimes draw Vs and Ms for birds in flight and a fair number of blobs of colour, bearing little relation to anything in particular. Put like that, Cossacks sounds a pretty unappealing picture. Actually, it's great. The calligraphic elements all those black lines and dashes are kept in check by the lyrical, bright, but not overly so, colours reds, blues, yellows, a dash of green or pink here and there; the composition, while at first seeming so random, is actually carefully balanced.