Still Life With A Purro (II) 1904

Henri Matisse made this painting, Still Life With A Purro (II), sometime in his career with oil paint on canvas. Look at this overall field of color – it’s like a mosaic, right? I can just imagine Matisse, in the studio, moving his brush with those small dabs of paint. Orange, blue, yellow, red, green. I bet he was dancing between colors, improvising like a jazz musician. And all those dots, they don’t exactly describe what’s there, but more how he feels about what’s there. The way that light refracts and shimmers. I get a sense he wanted to see how much he could push the boundaries of representation. How much could he abstract the world and still capture its essence, its joy? He’s in conversation with other painters, like Cezanne, but pushing further, finding his own voice. Painting becomes a way to stay curious, to keep exploring the possibilities of how we see, feel, and understand the world.