Holy Mountain IV 1946

Horace Pippin made this painting, Holy Mountain IV, with what looks like thin paint, maybe oil, and a lot of direct, visible drawing. The whole thing has this airy, spacious, quality, and the animals drawn in the foreground; the lion, cat and wolf, are like primal sketches, loose and free. I can almost feel Pippin's hand moving across the canvas, not fussy, just getting the image down. The tree is almost like a dark ideogram, straight up and down with a few simple branches. Then you've got the mountain, rendered in smooth, flat planes of grey. I love how he’s not afraid to leave the bare canvas showing through, which adds to that feeling of lightness and immediacy. Pippin makes me think a little bit of Milton Avery, the way he simplifies forms and uses color to create mood, but with an added rawness. His work reminds us that art doesn’t have to be perfect to be powerful. It’s in the process, in the gesture, that the magic happens.