Farvestudie til Langelinie-billedet 1923 - 1927

Edvard Weie made this watercolor somewhere around the time he was working on his 'Langelinie' painting. Just look at how he's scrubbed the paint in places! It's like he's trying to excavate the image from the paper, dragging those greens and blues and pinks around like he's wrestling with the scene itself. You can almost feel the give-and-take as he's figuring out the light, the atmosphere, the whole mood of the place. It's so fleeting and ephemeral, like capturing a memory as it fades. I wonder what he was thinking about while he was painting? Was he trying to capture the specific light, or just going for the general sense of a place? It's like he's having a conversation with the paper, seeing where it takes him. And it makes you think about all the other painters who've stood in front of a scene, trying to capture the uncapturable. Ultimately, that's what painting is, right? A conversation across time, across images, across all of us.