Pastoral Scene c. 1920

Heinrich Campendonk made this Pastoral Scene and he's conjuring a world for us with paint. It’s got this dreamlike quality; the paint handling is all soft and blurred. I imagine him working wet into wet, coaxing those figures and landscapes out of thin washes, each layer sinking into the last. There’s a mood of contemplation here, and I get the sense that Campendonk's just letting his imagination run wild. What was he thinking when he decided to make a person green? And the naked figure. Maybe he’d been looking at a lot of folk art, or maybe he just wanted to create his own mythology from scratch. The red house glows with an impossible light; the animals look at us expectantly. It almost feels like a stage set, like we’re about to see a play unfold. Campendonk, like so many artists, keeps the conversation going, reminding us that paintings aren't just objects, they're invitations to explore and imagine.