Mount Hood,Oregon 1904

Childe Hassam made this watercolor of Mount Hood in Oregon, on August 9, 1914. Imagine Hassam there, looking up at that formidable peak, trying to capture it with just a few strokes of color, dabbing with watercolor on paper. He’s using a muted palette of blues, browns, and whites to create a sense of the mountain's mass and the vastness of the sky above. Look closely and you can almost see the quick, decisive gestures of his hand, trying to simplify this monumental landscape into its most essential forms. I wonder what he was thinking as he painted? Was he awed by the mountain's majesty, or maybe he was more interested in capturing the light as it played across the snow? I love the way that each stroke of color seems to build on the last, creating a sense of depth and atmosphere. It’s like he’s not just painting a picture, but also trying to capture a feeling, a mood, a moment in time. I look at this and I think of Cezanne, another artist who spent his career trying to understand the essence of landscape. Artists are always in conversation with one another. Each painting is just one small part of a much larger conversation about what it means to see and to be in the world.