Sirmione 1913

John Singer Sargent made this watercolour called Sirmione, we don't know exactly when, but what is visible is a sense of capturing a fleeting moment. The blues and yellows wash into one another, blurring the boundaries between water, land, and sky, and it feels like seeing how light and colour interact with each other. I love how the brushstrokes are loose and confident, almost like he’s improvising. The paint isn’t overworked; it’s fresh and immediate, and you can see how the water in the medium allows for these luminous passages of light, especially in the foreground, where the pigment pools into rivulets of yellows and browns. The colours merge and bleed into one another. It’s so open and receptive, it feels like the paintings making itself. Sargent has echoes of someone like Turner, another artist who was totally in love with light and atmosphere, yet he brings his own sensibility to this kind of project. It’s a process, but also a record of someone really looking and responding to the world around them.