La cheminée du Roi, Marseille 1918

Henri Matisse painted "La cheminée du Roi, Marseille" with oils, and you can just feel him feeling his way across the canvas. The whole scene shimmers with that hazy mediterranean light and atmosphere. It feels like a momentary glimpse of a busy port scene, figures and objects captured on the fly. Look how those dabs of ochre and blue resolve into hazy figures moving about. I can imagine him thinking hard about Cézanne as he painted this. You can see how he's trying to find volume and depth with those little marks, the way he flattens and simplifies form. The sky is rendered in these loose, diagonal strokes, like he’s dragging the paint across the surface, making something solid out of thin air. Artists are always talking to one another, across time and space, picking up where the other left off. Painting lets you work through your ideas, to learn to see the world differently.