Still Life (Vase of Flowers) c. 1940 - 1941

Leonard Pytlak created this still life of flowers, made with blue ink on what looks like paper, and the way he’s worked gives it a really dreamy quality. There’s a kind of casualness to the mark making here, but I think that’s deceptive, the spray of blue is laid down so delicately to build up the image, almost as if it's hovering in space. I love how the flowers at the bottom aren’t fully formed, they're just these loose suggestions of shapes. It’s as if he's saying, “Here, this is what a flower *feels* like.” There's a fragility to it all, a sense that any moment now it could all just fade away into the white background. It puts me in mind of Édouard Vuillard, who found the extraordinary in the mundane. Like Vuillard, Pytlak reminds us that art is not just about what we see, but how we see it.