KWIATY 1944

Wladyslaw Strzeminski made this watercolour painting, "Kwiaty" – which means "Flowers" in Polish – sometime in the 1940s. Look at the way Strzeminski builds up the image with these almost calligraphic marks. You can sense the brush dancing across the page. For me, that’s the real subject of the painting: mark-making. Up close, you can see how each little stroke of colour is its own small event. The colours are translucent, like stained glass, and they sit on the surface of the paper, not really blending so much as vibrating next to each other. See the way the blues and greens are pulled up into vertical pillars, acting as a backdrop to the flowers. And the way the flowers are suggested through a series of yellow teardrops. It reminds me of work by Forrest Bess, who also had a very personal, almost secretive language of signs and symbols in his work. Art isn't about answers, but about making a space to think, play and imagine.