Vase on a Chair (Italian Jar) 1918

Bela Czobel seems to have made this oil painting of a vase on a chair in one sitting, or maybe over a couple of afternoons. The first thing that grabs you is the total immersion in warm, earthy tones. The brushwork is visible, almost like the painting has been built up from lots of separate marks, each one recording a single movement of the artist's hand. There are darker outlines around the vase and the chair, but they never fully contain the color, which feels very deliberate. I keep coming back to the way the paint has been applied so thickly in some areas, giving the surface a real texture. You can almost feel the artist wrestling with the medium, trying to capture the essence of the scene. It reminds me a little of Morandi, with its quiet focus and almost obsessive attention to the details of everyday objects. It’s like the painting is just trying to figure something out. Art doesn’t always need to make perfect sense, does it?