Still Life 1917 - 1923

Theo van Doesburg made this 'Still Life' painting with oil on canvas. It’s all rectangles, circles, semi-circles and lines in green, red, yellow and black, but you can still tell that it’s somehow a still life. I imagine Van Doesburg starting out, pushing paint around, maybe not sure what he wanted to do, but getting into a rhythm, arranging and re-arranging, wiping bits away, adding others. It’s fascinating how the rough edges of those flat shapes lend the painting a hand-made feel, like it's a collage made of construction paper. There’s a kind of push-and-pull dynamic going on, as if he was thinking about Mondrian but also about his own thing. It’s like he’s talking to the whole history of painting, but also inventing a new language. What I love about painting is that it’s always open-ended. It’s not about having the right answer, but about the ongoing search.