Piano Keys Lake 1905

Frantisek Kupka made this painting, titled Piano Keys Lake, using oil paint to imagine a musical waterscape. There are so many juicy marks in this piece! The piano keys at the bottom are built from delicious dollops of paint. I can almost feel the loaded brush as Kupka pulled it down the canvas, leaving vertical beads of pigment in its wake. It makes me think about the physical act of painting: the push and pull of the brush, the drag of the bristles, and the way the paint both obeys and resists the artist's touch. See how he suggests a whole scene—a lake, trees, even people in a boat—with just a few carefully placed dabs of color? In a way, Kupka is doing something similar to Kandinsky, trying to find a visual language for music, where the painting isn't of something, but *is* something, like a musical composition. It's like he's saying that art, like music, doesn't have to represent something to be meaningful.