Salem 1915

Maurice Prendergast made this painting, Salem, in the early 20th century, and it’s like a party of colors on canvas. The approach is all about these little dabs and dashes of color, a mosaic of marks that somehow come together to show us a scene, but it’s also happy to be just itself, a field of joyful color. Looking closer, you see how the paint is thin and washy, almost like watercolor. It’s soaked right into the canvas in places, letting the weave show through. The colors are bright and playful, not trying to be realistic, but making their own kind of reality. Notice that fence, it is not like any fence I've ever seen, made of lavender and blue stripes with no care for perspective. It just hangs there, singing. Prendergast reminds me a bit of Bonnard, both loved domestic scenes and had that same love for color. In the end, it is all about seeing, isn’t it? And Prendergast shows us a way of seeing that's less about what things look like, and more about how they feel.