Dawn in Montserrat 1935

Andre Masson made this watercolour, Dawn in Montserrat, with soft washes of colour and bold, gestural marks. I'm thinking about Masson, mixing his paints, and how he must have witnessed so many dawns. Imagine him up early, or maybe not having slept at all, staring at a landscape as the sun comes up. The mountain is solid and still but the sun is pure movement, like a wheel that's spinning and spraying light across the sky. The red, it’s the color of energy, or maybe even anger. The rest of the colors are pale, watery, like the world is just waking up and hasn’t found its true colours yet. I see the hands reaching up like the mountain is praying, or maybe just stretching towards the light. To me it looks like a dreamscape, a place of shifting shapes and half-formed ideas. Masson was part of the Surrealist movement, and you can really sense how interested he was in the unconscious, in dreams, and in the raw energy of the human mind. I feel a deep sense of connection to this artist and other painters who are trying to make sense of the world by way of images.