Santa Maria della Salute 1904

John Singer Sargent made this watercolor, Santa Maria della Salute, capturing a Venetian waterscape. The color palette is so gentle and warm, but it's the mark-making that I find the most exciting. The sketchy lines and forms of the figures and boats, for example, suggest a real focus on the process of artmaking itself. Looking at this piece, I'm really drawn to the texture and surface of the watercolor, which is so tactile. It's like you can feel the grain of the paper, and the way the colors flow into one another. I particularly like the way he's rendered the water in the foreground, it's so suggestive, it's almost as if he's using the translucence of the paint to capture the fluidity of the subject itself. The building looms, grand but somehow softened, like an impression fading from memory. Turner springs to mind here, both artists use light and loose brushwork to capture a fleeting moment or impression, and their work is open to constant reinterpretation. There is no fixed meaning, and that's the beauty of it.