Sable de bois 1953

Camille Bryen made this painting, Sable de bois, with oils, and in it, I see the joy of artmaking as an exploratory process. The palette feels limited, mostly blues against a sandy ground, but look closer and you’ll find he coaxes a whole world from those few colours. There’s a materiality to Bryen's work that I love. The paint isn’t too thick, but you can still see the marks, the traces of the brush dancing across the canvas. Notice those dark blue vertical strokes on the left—they’re almost like a curtain, heavy and imposing. But then your eye catches the lighter blue and green lines weaving through the composition, and suddenly the painting opens up, becomes less about solid forms and more about atmosphere. Bryen reminds me a bit of Nicolas de Staël, in the way he balances abstraction and a sense of lived experience. It’s all a conversation, right? Artists talking to each other across time, riffing on ideas, and showing us that there’s always more than one way to see the world.