After the Storm

Maurice Prendergast made this small oil painting on panel, After the Storm, with a flurry of marks, seemingly dashed off in the heat of the moment. The color palette is muted, as though filtered through a grey sky, mostly blues, browns, and creams. It's all about capturing an immediate, almost fleeting impression. What strikes me most is the physicality of the paint. You can almost feel the bristles of the brush as Prendergast applied the paint, sometimes thinly, sometimes in thicker dabs that catch the light. Look at the way he renders the figures on the beach, particularly the one in the bright red dress – it's like a shorthand, a quick notation of form. And those figures wading in the water, reduced to mere splashes of color, are so evocative. Prendergast’s loose, impressionistic style reminds me a little of Bonnard. Like Bonnard, he wasn't trying to create a perfect representation of reality, but more like an echo of a feeling or a memory. Art isn’t about answers, it’s about the questions that stay with us.