Meer aan de voet een berg Possibly 1948

Anton Labberton made this small watercolor painting, ‘Meer aan de voet een berg’ or ‘Lake at the Foot of a Mountain,’ using delicate, muted colors and a light touch. It’s so pared down, almost like a memory of a place, with washes of lavender, grey and pale blue. You can sense the artist feeling their way through the image, one soft layer at a time. The way Labberton handles the watercolor is interesting; the washes are transparent and subtle, but there’s a definite texture to the paper that peeks through. See how the mountain range is built up from layers, almost like sediment? And those tiny, dark dashes across the water – they’re so simple, yet they evoke the vastness of the lake. I keep coming back to that lone tree on the right. It's like a punctuation mark in this quiet scene, anchoring the whole composition. It reminds me of Agnes Martin’s landscapes; the kind of paintings that hover between representation and abstraction. It's this kind of painting that reminds me that art is always an ongoing conversation, an exploration without fixed answers.