Mrs. Haviland 1911

John Marin painted Mrs. Haviland in watercolor, and you can almost feel him dabbing at the paper, letting the pigments bloom and mingle. He’s using a limited palette of browns, blues, and yellows, allowing the white of the paper to shine through, giving it all an airy, unfinished quality. I imagine him observing Mrs. Haviland, maybe capturing her essence in quick, fluid strokes. There’s a looseness here, a willingness to let the paint do its thing. The hat is amazing. You know, painting with watercolors is a constant dance between control and surrender. The way the colors bleed into each other reminds me that painting is an act of discovery, where happy accidents can lead to unexpected beauty. I love how this work sits in relation to the paintings of his American Modernist peers like Georgia O’Keefe. All these artists are somehow in conversation, riffing off of each other’s ideas, pushing the boundaries of what painting can be. Each stroke, each gesture, is a record of a thought, a feeling, a moment in time.