The Callers 1925

Dean Cornwell’s "The Callers" is rendered with a confident looseness, a bravura performance in oil paint. I imagine Cornwell, in his studio, stepping back and forth, adding a dab of thick impasto there, a translucent glaze there. Look at the green coat of the figure in the foreground—it’s all juicy strokes, alive with light. I wonder what he was thinking, what mood he was in? Was he trying to capture the essence of a bygone era, or simply revelling in the act of painting itself? You can see the ghost of a ground layer, the paper shining through in places like mist. The way Cornwell scumbles the paint around the edges makes them dissolve into the background, a deliberate act of deconstruction! It reminds me of Sargent's portraits, but with a decidedly American swagger. It's a conversation across time, with each artist building upon the discoveries of the last. Painting, after all, is a form of thinking, a way of seeing and feeling the world that embraces all its beautiful ambiguities.