Romantic Fantasy 1920 - 1921

Edvard Weie made this painting, *Romantic Fantasy*, with oil paint. Look at these big, confident strokes of tan, brown, and blue, kind of thrown down, but thoughtfully, of course! I can imagine him, Weie, out in nature, trying to capture the feeling of the waterfall and the light, but also really just wrestling with the paint itself. I see how each dab and swipe builds the image, layer upon layer, like he's almost building a sculpture instead of just painting a picture. That waterfall especially – it’s not just water, right? It’s energy, it’s movement, it's almost like Weie is using the waterfall to represent an overwhelming kind of feeling. And that feeling is something that later painters like Joan Mitchell or Helen Frankenthaler were also chasing: how to take landscape and push it to the edge of abstraction, so it’s more about feeling than seeing. In a way, all painters are having this conversation, across time, about what paint can do, what a mark can mean, and how close you can get to the unsayable.