Mond c. 1921

Karl Wiener made this drawing called Mond with what looks like coloured pencils. There's something so appealing about the directness of the mark making, the way you can really see the process. The colours are what grab me first, that saturated orange moon against the deep blue sky. The texture is all in these little hatched lines, a sort of energetic scribbling that builds up the forms. It’s like he's thinking through the image, letting the lines find their way. Look at how the horizontal lines create the buildings and the curved lines build the sense of a hill. Wiener is doing something similar to what I try to do when I paint, thinking through the material. It makes me think of Paul Klee, that same kind of playful exploration of line and color. You can feel Wiener trying to figure out the world, one little mark at a time.