Dancer in Green 1912

Max Weber made ‘Dancer in Green’ with watercolor on paper, and looking at it, I can feel the artist thinking about the weight of the fabric, the shape of the dancer’s body, the way the light hits her. It's pretty cool how Weber renders this figure not just as a dancer, but as an idea *of* a dancer—all angles and geometries. You can see the hand of the artist in the brushstrokes, the way the paint bleeds into the paper. There is a feeling of something provisional, you know? And that green, it’s not just green, is it? It’s this whole world of greens and yellows and blues, all mixing and mingling, like colors are doing their own little dance. For me it is not just a painting, but a record of a dance itself. It reminds me a bit of the work of Marsden Hartley, or even some of those early Cubist paintings by Picasso. Like Weber, those artists were all trying to figure out how to capture movement and energy on a static surface. That's the thing about painting, isn't it? It’s all about trying to freeze time, even while letting it flow through you.