Lake Thun from Lessig 1904

Ferdinand Hodler made this painting of Lake Thun from Lessig. The paint is applied in a mosaic-like way that makes me think of pointillism, where color becomes an optical effect more than a description. It’s like he's building an image through a slow, methodical process. Check out the water and the sky, Hodler’s layered blues and greens, creating a kind of shimmering surface. It's not about capturing the exact look of the water, it’s about creating a feeling, an atmosphere. The way he repeats the horizontal lines throughout the landscape, like echoes, adds to this feeling. There’s something deeply calming but also a little haunting in the regularity of it. Hodler reminds me a little of early Mondrian, in that they both tried to find some sort of universal, abstract order in nature. But where Mondrian went totally abstract, Hodler stayed on the edge of representation, never quite letting go of the world. And maybe that's the beauty of art, it never gives you a single answer.