Coastal View from France 1918

Lili Elbe painted this little oil on canvas of a French coastal view; the scene seems to capture a fleeting moment, a sensory experience. Elbe’s artmaking feels rooted in the process of seeing and feeling the landscape. Look at the yellow shrub in the foreground. The paint is applied with short, choppy strokes, thick in some areas, thin in others, creating a textured surface that mimics the density of the foliage. The yellow vibrates against the greens, a kind of visual buzz that animates the scene. The blue sea in the background, painted with looser, broader strokes, provides a calming contrast, a sense of depth and distance. The physical handling of the medium, the way the paint is dabbed and dragged across the canvas, speaks to an immediacy, a direct connection between the artist's eye, hand, and the subject. There's something about the colour and the composition here that remind me of some of Bonnard’s landscapes, that same sensitivity to colour and light, an impressionistic desire to capture the shifting moods of nature.