Venice Gondoliers 1975

LeRoy Neiman throws down globs and dashes of color in his painting "Venice Gondoliers," making the whole scene vibrate like a jazz solo. I can imagine him working, really laying into the canvas, trying to capture not just what Venice looks like, but how it feels – the energy, the light bouncing off the water, the sheer spectacle of it all. There’s a pink stroke right in the middle of the painting that feels like pure intuition, a gut feeling translated directly onto the canvas. You can see other artists who work like this: Joan Mitchell, for example, and Willem de Kooning. Neiman’s got his own thing, though, and it's his quick way of capturing the fleeting moments. It’s not about perfection, but about capturing the essence of a place, a moment, a feeling. And that’s what makes painting so endlessly fascinating – we’re all riffing off each other, across time, trying to figure out what it means to be human, one brushstroke at a time.