Saint-Palais, Bord De Mer 1902

Armand Guillaumin built this seascape with strokes of oil on canvas. I can just imagine him, squinting into the sun, trying to capture how the light refracts on the water. See how he's used these short brushstrokes, almost like he's dabbing the paint onto the canvas? It makes the whole scene shimmer. There's a real push and pull between the warm yellows and oranges of the rocks in the foreground and the cool blues and pinks of the sky and sea. I feel like Guillaumin wasn’t trying to copy what he saw, but trying to find some kind of equivalent in paint for what it felt like to be there, on that beach, at that moment. Painters have been wrestling with the problem of how to capture light and space on a flat surface forever. It’s like we’re all in this big, ongoing conversation, trying to figure out how to make sense of the world through color and form.