Copyright: Public Domain
August Macke made this watercolor painting, View of Hilterfingen, with fluid washes of blues, yellows, and violets, like light refracted through a prism. I can almost see Macke outside, maybe a little cold, quickly trying to capture the scene with loose, transparent strokes. I imagine him thinking about how Cézanne turned landscapes into geometric puzzles, but deciding to go his own way. See how the houses become simple shapes, blocks of color stacked together? But they still feel like houses, don’t they? The fields are like a patchwork quilt, each square a slightly different hue. There’s something so fresh and immediate about the way Macke used watercolor. It’s like he’s inviting us to see the world through his eyes, not just as it is, but as it feels. He inspires me to approach painting with a similar sense of openness and experimentation, embracing the unpredictable nature of the medium and trusting my intuition. We’re all looking and learning from each other, right?
Comments
In October 1913, Macke withdrew to Hilterfingen, a small town on Lake Thun in Switzerland. Here he depicted the surrounding countryside in a strongly abstracted composition. Rather than representing the meadows in various shades of green, the artist juxtaposed complementary colours such as yellow and purple, orange and blue in rhythmic alternations. He translated the rolling fields and the gabled roofs of the village houses into triangles, rhombi and rectangles spreading across the surface like a mosaic. By choosing the same formal language for nature and architecture alike, he brought them together to form a whole.)
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