Reaching for you 2010

Louise Bourgeois made this watercolor and ink drawing, Reaching for you, in no particular year. I’m always fascinated by the immediacy of watercolor, how the paint seems to bloom and spread, almost like a stain, or a memory surfacing. Bourgeois lays down this fleshy, pinkish ground. It’s soft, but also kind of unsettling, like a body without skin. Then there’s this figure, drawn with such delicate lines, reclining, reaching towards this dark, inky blot. That blue, it’s like a bruise, or a deep pool of emotion. It makes me think about how we reach for things that might hurt us, how desire can be tangled up with pain. The way she uses the ink, letting it bleed and drip, feels so raw and unguarded. It reminds me a little of Goya, the way he used aquatint to create these shadowy, dreamlike spaces. But Bourgeois is more intimate, more personal. She’s inviting us into her own world, a world of tangled emotions and unresolved desires, and reminding us that art can embrace ambiguity and multiple interpretations, resisting any fixed or definitive meaning.