Village de la Beauce c. 1950s

This is Village de la Beauce, by Louis Joseph Soulas, and it's probably made with ink. It’s a landscape that's built up of lots and lots of small, quick marks. To me, that means that Soulas wasn't necessarily trying to make a realistic picture. He was mapping an impression. Look at the haystacks in the foreground, they are these dark, almost scribbled masses. But then you look up into the sky, and you see the same kind of mark being used to describe the clouds. There's a real consistency of touch that pulls the whole picture together, and it's really about the surface, about how he puts the ink on the paper. The more you look, the more the village itself seems to dissolve into this field of marks. It reminds me of how Philip Guston would make these all-over paintings where everything is kind of equally weighted, equally important. You start to see the world as a field of activity, of marks, rather than a collection of separate things.