Charming 1974

Here is a painting made by Alexander Calder with gouache on paper. You can see all these dynamic dots kind of floating in space. I can almost picture Calder carefully plotting the arrangement of the spheres, stepping back, then adjusting. The black outlines feel so decisive against the gentle yellow and grey washes, don’t they? The paint looks almost watered down in places, like he’s coaxing the colors across the page with a light touch. It makes me wonder, was he thinking about Joan Miro or maybe even Kandinsky when he was making this? The red dot, though, wow, that's like a little spark of energy in this otherwise chill composition. It just goes to show that painting is such a conversation, artists responding to each other across time, inspiring each other to try new things. And it's never really fixed; there’s always room for a new reading, a new feeling.