Poissons et fleurs 1950

Marc Chagall made "Poissons et fleurs" using ink and watercolor. Can you imagine the studio? The smell of paints, the scratch of the brush, the dance of water and pigment bleeding across the page. Look at how the blue washes across the fish, giving them a cool, spectral quality against the black lines that define their form. The flowers above are less defined, almost ghostly. I wonder if he’s thinking about memory here, how things fade but still leave a trace. Maybe he was thinking about Matisse! The tabletop, a chaotic jumble of lines and dots, feels unstable. Is this a dream? Is it a memory? So, what was he chasing? What kind of world? These paintings feel as though he was trying to make sense of something that couldn’t be spoken outright. He paints how it feels, not how it looks.