Big Top Interior c. 1940s

John Marin made this drawing titled Big Top Interior using crayon on paper. The circus is about controlled chaos, right? And here, Marin’s managed to distill that feeling using just a few colors and marks. I can imagine him in the stands with his sketchbook, trying to capture the whole scene, the spectacle, the feeling of the circus in a few quick strokes. There are blue smudges, frantic red scribbles, and decisive black lines. The red crayon seems to dance across the page, echoing the energy of the performers. The blue acts more as a background tone, a feeling. There’s a star down there in the left corner, too. Marin’s known for his watercolors of New York City. You can see some of the same energy and dynamism here. Artists are always looking at other artists, riffing, expanding, and reacting, in an ongoing conversation across time. For Marin and other artists, painting embraces ambiguity, which allows for multiple interpretations, and meaning over fixed readings.